


Fortunate Son

by cynthia_arrow (thesilverarrow)



Category: Lost
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-31
Updated: 2014-05-31
Packaged: 2018-01-27 20:22:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1721393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesilverarrow/pseuds/cynthia_arrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the early spring of 1968. At a university in the deep south, the president of a liberal student group comes to give a speech about the problems in this country, and he meets a clever but bitter janitor who thinks he's the damndest sort of hippie. And, yeah, he'd tell him just how much they resent his kind down here...if he didn't want so badly himself to escape the south</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally posted several years ago, at livejournal. I am simply archiving it here.
> 
> Fair warning: this story involves politics, but I'm not trying to preach, especially not about Vietnam. (That would be ludicrous, given that I was born at the dawn of the Reagan Era.) I've brought these two down on the sides I think they could conceivably be on, given their personalities and backgrounds, as well as the events of their lives, not based on my own preferences about politics. Luckily, neither of them is entirely conservative or liberal, just reacting personally to the world around them. 
> 
> Also note: I obviously didn't live through the Age of Aquarius, so rather than descend into a lot of clichés, I've chosen to play it safe and not overindulge on too many gratuitous details to mark the late sixties, like a lot of slang or stuff about their clothing or anything. Maybe some music, and that's it. So I'm likely to fuck things up royally. Please forgive that, especially if you know wherefore I speak.

  
_"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,  
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.  
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,  
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."_

\--"All Along the Watchtower," Bob Dylan

  
  
  
James said goodnight to the head cleaning woman with a nod and breathed a sigh of relief to finally have the building empty, or at least as empty as it could be—and that only temporarily, given the auditorium full of undergraduates just beyond that set of heavy wooden doors. Soon, they'd be spilling out into the lobby, noisy and oblivious, but he hoped to be long gone by then.  
  
They didn't think he listened to their chatter, but he did—listened to every goddamn word they said when they walked past him like he wasn't there, not that they said anything worth hearing. It was just that there was nothing else to do with those mind-numbing hours James pushed the trash cart around, so he couldn't help but keep his ears open.  
  
He didn't just listen, though; he thought—always, and about everything. Maybe too much sometimes. He mulled over the newspapers with his coffee in the morning as he ate a piece of toast over the sink and listened to his momma coughing in the room down the hall, still half asleep or hung over; at any rate, not likely to care about what new fuck-up in southeast Asia had made the protesters even more crazy.   
  
He cared about what was happening to this country that used to seem so stable (or maybe it was that he was getting older, finally seeing things clearly; he didn't know), but he had nobody to talk to about it. It wasn't like he could flag them down coming out of Harland Hall and suggest what? That they all forget he's a janitor and just let him take up space on the steps of the old library and shoot the breeze with them? That they come on his rounds with him and watch him pick up wads of toilet paper from the floor of the girls' lavatory and have a long rambling discussion with him as they walked?  
  
He wasn't stupid. This was a university, and if he'd learned anything about universities from living in this town, it was that they weren't about learning or open-mindedness. They were about kids leaving home, thinking that hour or two of distance from their families made them sudden experts on the world.   
  
James knew a lot about a few things. He could work on an engine and he could shingle a house. He could even make a passable meatloaf, if nobody was standing over him nagging him. He knew a little about a lot of things, but he certainly would never say he was an expert on anything he'd never seen for himself. Like the war in Vietnam. He didn't believe he could have anything better to say than people who were actually over there, from the generals down to the lowliest soldier, even the newspaper reporters—all of them risking their lives for truth and freedom.   
  
He didn't even feel like an expert on this dark cloud that hung over his town and every other town in Alabama—hell, from Mississippi all the way to Orangeburg, South Carolina. This so-called negro problem wasn't just a southern problem, and it wasn't even just a negro problem, he reckoned, but he didn't think he had the answers to that any more than he thought he could figure out how General Westmoreland might deal better with the latest offensive of the Vietcong.   
  
But even if he didn't presume to have easy answers, he didn't see any harm in discussing things, maybe coming to better conclusions about them, and it had made him almost sick to his stomach earlier that day to see this girl come out of the dining hall and put her political science book on the front steps so she could sit her barely-covered ass on it instead of the concrete. Knowledge was a stepping stone to these people, a thing they accumulated only to turn it loose again before it could change them. They didn't care about anything other than complaining, and they did that only for its own sake. He didn't give a flying fuck about their long hair or any of it, it was the willful ignorance that made him lay his forehead hard against the doorframe of the supply closet and slow down his breathing, just enough that it didn't supersede the faint sound of the speaker's voice leaking out of the auditorium. He wanted ammunition. He wanted to be able to tell people he heard it with his own two ears: university jerks who only wanted a revolution because they were bored out of their fucking minds.  
  
But even that, really, he could understand, and maybe that's why it made him so twitchy.  
  
The speakers were brought in for a student government sponsored program. It had a nice enough sounding name, but it was really just an excuse to stir the pot. A genuine excuse, though, with out-there liberals balanced against steadfast conservatives in something like a grudge match of words and ideas, designed to make people actually think about the world they were living in. All the speakers were a little nuts, but a smart sort of nuts, something James could appreciate. It was the one worthwhile thing he'd seen the university do this year, and he could only stand outside in the corridor, pretending to clean up, in reality listening to some damn kid from California—some student leader, and they were the worst—talk in over-earnest tones about the same shit they always did: not being complacent. Rebellion, he thought, was all fine and good…so long as there was actually a reason to rebel. So far, James hadn't seen a clear one, and he hadn't heard one from this nasal-sounding motherfucker either.  
  
The doorframe was cool to the touch, but he felt too hot, and his head was pounding. He needed a cigarette and some fresh air. The kid was the last speaker of the night—a shame, because he was the weakest—so James took off his smock and his uniform cap, threw it in with his cart as he pushed it inside and locked up the closet, already shaking out a cigarette from a half-crumpled pack as he slipped out the back door.  
  
He took slid down to sit on the concrete, already feeling much more like himself without the polyester nightmare clinging to him. He took his wallet out of his back pocket as it poked at his ass, and he laid it beside him and the pack of cigarettes on top. The wind was strong enough to put out two matches before one would stay lit, but everything was right with the world as the nicotine hit his system and he finally cooled off. He felt a little less grimy and ornery out here under a sky full of stars. He had to admit that the campus was beautiful at night, the canopy of trees on the Quad making him feel every ghost of this institution's memory, even the crazy Civil War soldiers, looking down on him.   
  
Every night when he walked out of that building, tired and smelling of cleaner and polish, he wondered what kind of sky they saw over there. He didn't wonder too long or too much, knowing he couldn't get too far in mapping it in his mind without seeing the flash of bombs or hearing gunfire that could never be the same as the terror of having it flying past your ear. And, anyway, he normally had only the short walk to his car to fret over it before the reality of a trip to the liquor store and what to make for dinner and what kind of mood she'd been in always quickly took over, and he didn't think about them again until the next morning, in that brief time before he left for work at the shop, where he would hear people talk football and carburetors until lunch. Life went on. That was the cruelest thing of all. He'd learned that after his father left and he realized—at a twelve too old to really be twelve—that nothing stopped or fixed itself just because you wanted it to.  
  
But tonight, he had somehow found one of those moments when the world comes to a dead halt around you and even if it's quiet, you begin to feel all the things you shut out creeping up to the edges, pressing to get in. He was thinking, and it made him feel kind of small. Even the flag flying over the library was small, flapping in the stiff breeze undaunted. What was big was the buildings and the expanse of grass in front of him, a place he came to every day that sometimes could still take him by surprise, transform in his mind from a breeding ground for half-unconscious idiots to the wide open place of learning it was meant to be.  
  
Of course, the illusion was broken when he heard the sound of voices echoing strangely back over the Quad as the students trickled out of the building at the front and milled around outside, probably forgetting everything they'd heard.  
  
That wasn't fair. They'd been wildly attentive to Bobby Kennedy the day before. But the man was like a celebrity, like a charismatic actor. Misguided but so cool and intelligent. They met him with cheers. He deserved all of them, James thought, if only for making his generation give a damn.   
  
He made up his mind to have another cigarette, given the way traffic would be hell for a little while yet. As he took up the pack, he couldn't resist opening his wallet and rifling through it. Pictures of his younger cousins, kids that looked up to him like an uncle. Stub from The Graduate, which he'd been too busy making out with Mona Ritter to really see. Ten dollars in ones.   
  
Then that thing.  
  
It was a sickness, a compulsion, but a man who didn't have some hidden compulsions about it or deep-seated fears was either inhuman or lying. He had to look at it from time to time, as though it would disappear when he wasn't paying attention. Not that its disappearance would help anything.   
  
On the surface, it was so innocuous, so mundane; it was what it meant that was scary. So even if he didn't hate is as a piece of paper, the minute he thought about anything happening to his fucking draft card, he came over in a cold sweat. He knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he could never burn it. He didn't see how people could. Of course, his uncle asked him how he could bear not to watch the lotteries. Everyone has their own ways of coping, he said. Self-preservation.   
  
He gingerly slid the card back into his wallet and let it rest on the ground again. He'd been feeling a little lately like everything he did needed to be that precise and controlled. If it wasn't, something in him would come apart. He'd been teetering on the edge of something, no longer happy with this simple life he had. Maybe it was that he was coming to decide it wasn't really as simple as he thought it should be, that that was never really possible. Anyway, this low-level tension, ratcheted up a notch as he was out there vulnerable under the sky, was perhaps what made the sound of the other back door being thrown open so jarring.  
  
He couldn't see who it was coming out into the dark, only hear an exchange of voices—excited, maybe a little tired, but definitely the sound of minds still firing on all cylinders. For them it would easily be the kind of night when you just keep talking and talking until you fall asleep or get too drunk and pass out. James hadn't had a night like that in a while, maybe since high school, when he and his small group of buddies used to go camping up at the lake and didn't sleep until sunup.  
  
It was different seeing something like that from the outside. Grating, almost, to hear that sort of camaraderie, especially when certain words floated out into the air, and he could almost see the gesticulations of their hands as they talked. He was both mesmerized and irritated, and he only heard too late a particular intonation, recognized it and how it sounded different when the guy wasn't on the stage spewing easy words about hard things to do like think for yourself and fight for things that are worthwhile. Out there, he was less majestic, but less nasal, too, and it bugged James to no end that he still couldn't see him, because he didn't know what he looked like, could only picture him in his head.  
  
James stood up, finally, as though to go home when all he really wanted was to stay there in that peaceful place. Maybe they heard him, because suddenly someone said, "You have any matches over there?"  
  
A girl's voice giggled, but James said anyway, "Yeah."  
  
Before he could stride over, make the gesture and retreat, one of them crunched over the grass between them. He was in a suit, could have maybe been one of those graduate student nerds in Payton Hall who looked so serious and maybe a little old-fashioned in their professional attire. Not really the type he would normally associate with that crowd, although those types sometimes did surprise a person. Fuckin' flower children crawled out of the most unexpected woodwork, especially down here. But the guy's tie was loose and he smiled crookedly at him and ran his hands through his short-cropped brown hair as James handed over the book of matches. His brown eyes were tired but amused, and he said thanks softly.   
  
He was about to turn and walk away when he stopped and held up the matchbook, obviously planning the negotiation of if and how he'd return it.   
  
He said, "You smoke?" James flashed the pack in his hands, but the guy's eyes narrowed and he said, "No, I mean  _smoke_."  
  
James tried not to gape at him. Wouldn't be the first time the preppy type blazed up in front of him. Truthfully, James wouldn't have minded a joint right about then, but he would have entirely minded smoking with that bunch, so he just frowned before he could help it, and when his eyes shifted skeptically to the knot of people in the darkened doorway on the other side of the bushes, the guy just nodded and laughed a little too openly and pulled a joint out his pocket.  
  
"They get on my freaking nerves, too, sometimes" he muttered, and as he nodded toward the side of the building, the dark alley between Harland and McKinney, and as James followed his sensible shoes, the echo of that voice begins to creep in, how he'd said  _get_ and not  _git_ , how his  _no_  had been the same one James had heard for half an hour a little while before, emphatic and accompanied sometimes but what sounded like the slam of his fist against a podium. He wondered what the man's now tired and placid face had looked like when he had been doing his best preaching just half an hour earlier.   
  
"You're Jackson Shephard," he said to his back, almost shellshocked, and for no good reason.   
  
The guy turned and gave him an equally surprised look. "You listened to my speech?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"What did you think?"  
  
"I think you're a fucking moron," James said, and then he stopped, utterly bewildered by how something like that could have come out of his mouth without his meaning it to. He prized himself on keeping his tongue in check. He'd learned the hard way over the course of his life to keep out of fights by being cool-headed, observing and then acting. Except when something really pushed his button, and then he struck back so fast it scared him. He hadn't realized so many of his buttons were being pushed that evening until he said what he said and stood ready for the Shephard kid to wheel on him and take a shot.  
  
But the guy just glared at him, puzzled or amused, he couldn't tell, and kept walking. James kept walking, too, in spite of himself. The man was apparently unpredictable, so if nothing else, that would be interesting. And he  _did_  have grass he was willing to share, even with someone who called him a moron.  
  
Shephard's back was already against the stone façade of McKinney, his arms stretched over the railing by the side entrance, when James came into the alley.   
  
And he was already smoking. After he took a hit, he said, "You think you're the first person to disagree with me?"  
  
"No," James said, coming up to stand in front of him, digging his shoes into the sidewalk. "I reckon you expected that when you came down here."  
  
Shephard laughed and held out the joint. "You think you people—"  
  
"You people?"  
  
"Sorry," he said, as if to stave off James's annoyance. "Southerners." But then his voice slid right back into the sarcasm. "You venerable southerners—"  
  
"Watch your mouth," James snapped.  
  
Shephard scoffed, his voice rising a bit. "This from the person who called me a what? A fucking moron? Trust me when I say I don't have anything to say against particular ones of you, it's just that some of you are crazy and backward. But I don't know you. So when I say _venerable southerners_ —"  
  
"You mean hillbillies who still think they live on plantations."  
  
"Isn't that mixing things up a bit?"  
  
James just glared at him and took a hit before he held out the joint to him, hoping like hell it would calm him down enough and fast enough that he didn't have to take a swing at the guy.   
  
Shephard took the joint back, but he quickly caught it up in his left hand and extended his right, tentative but not quite backing down. He said solemnly, "We got off on the wrong foot, I think. I'm Jack Shephard."   
  
"Not Jackson?"  
  
"No. But it sure sounds impressive, doesn't it?"  
  
James grinned in spite of himself and took his hand. It was warm, sweaty even. He said, "James Ford."   
  
His palm slid away from Jack's slowly, as though both of them were somehow reluctant to break away from human contact. Why he should be that desperate to connect with this kind of uppity asshole, he couldn't fathom, so he halfway spat out, "And, no, I'm not a student."  
  
"No? Thank God."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"It would take too long to explain."  
  
"But you're the president of some national student thing, aren't you?"  
  
He nodded. "Then you can imagine I get sick of undergraduates."  
  
"You a grad student?"  
  
"Yeah."   
  
He didn't elaborate, and James didn't want to ask the question. There was no crime in finding legal ways to dodge the draft, and deferment for graduate school was as good as any. Okay, so maybe it made James's skin itch, that instinctive reaction to these types, but he fought that battle between his patriotism and his realism daily, so he was used to it by now. Mostly.  
  
Shephard said, "Anyway, what I was going to say was that you folks down here are no different from people anywhere, really. This whole country's got its head up its ass. It's all fucked."  
  
"You really believe that?"  
  
"Sure."  
  
"It's a sad world you live in, then."  
  
Shephard just nodded and exhaled, closing his eyes for a moment, and James could almost see his face relaxing. He hadn't realized how wound up the guy had really been until he saw him come unwound. And he hadn't realized how uncomfortable the guy was with trying to be charismatic until he found that this face in front of him, the one he'd seen from the first, couldn't possibly match the face of the man he'd heard on stage.   
  
After a long silence, Shephard said, "This is the place, isn't it? Where the governor tried to keep the colored kids from registering?"  
  
"As if you didn't know that."  
  
He smiled. "Just making conversation. Were you here, then?"  
  
"Here? How old do you think I am?"  
  
"No. I meant in town. You are from here, aren't you?"  
  
"Yeah." There was no sense in being coy about that, or about his age, even if the guy probably had four, five years on him. "I was starting high school."  
  
"What was it like?"  
  
"What was what like?"  
  
"Being down here during the civil rights movement?"  
  
"As if it's over, or as if it's only happening down here."  
  
"Are you always this difficult?"  
  
James nodded.  
  
Shephard laughed. "But seriously, what was it like?"  
  
"I just don't know how the hell a person answers a question like that."  
  
"Honestly," he said, passing back the joint.  
  
James sat down on the cool steps, and he was surprised to see Shephard sit down beside him and plant his elbows on the step behind, like he was comfortably settling in for a story. Because that's what southerners are, right? Storytellers. Recounting patiently and colorfully the story of a troubled region. James almost snorted to himself. Fuckin' ignorant west coast asshole.   
  
So James frowned and took the joint from him, leisurely taking a hit before he said, "It's not like we were camped out in lawn chairs on the Quad. We saw it on the news like everybody else."  
  
"Sure."  
  
James laughed, feeling it finally start to hit him. Damn if weed didn't make him giggly sometimes. He rubbed his palm over his face to sober himself, but it really was a funny story, thinking about telling it to an outsider.  
  
"My uncle," James said, "was one of the policemen there that day."  
  
"Blocking the door?"  
  
"Nobody was actually blocking anything. It was more of a…I don't know, symbolic kind of thing? And I think he was way off, so far from the grandstanding he spent most of the day talking to the guys in the press core. Anyway, he didn't much care whether those negro kids were allowed in or not. But he did what he was supposed to do. Backed up the governor like he was born to do it. And, then, when Kennedy called in the National Guard to break up the blockade, my uncle shrugged his shoulders, went home, changed into his National Guard uniform, and came back to stand on the other side and help walk them through."  
  
"No shit?"  
  
"Who could make up a story like that? He wasn't the only one, either. But, really, that's all the inside knowledge I have about that day. This big step for civil rights and it was like a big pageant or something, like a play."  
  
"Sometimes I feel like everything's a play and we're all just stuck in roles we didn't write." He exhaled with a cough, his eyes first on the sky then staring ahead at the brick wall across the sidewalk. James could almost see the gears turning in his mind.  
  
"Do y'all really believe that kind of shit?"  
  
"Y'all?"  
  
"You all."  
  
"I know what  _y'all_  means. I've been listening to your SGA president spit it out all day. I mean, who all?"  
  
"You…lefty types. You're good at saying things you think are so profound. I wonder if you realize how much dope a person has to be on for those things to sound like they mean something."  
  
"Oh, they always sound like they mean something. It's whether they actually do that's the question." He leaned to the side a bit, as though he were trying to get a better look at James. "You didn't call me a hippie or a pinko commie."  
  
"You don't look like a hippie, and I don't know that I'd recognize a commie unless he was wearing his 'I love Stalin' badge."  
  
Shephard giggled. "Fair enough. And I'm not one anyway. Either."  
  
"Well, I didn't think a guy as rich as you could really be a hippie."  
  
"Rich?"  
  
"That's a tailored suit."  
  
"And you would know because…?"  
  
"My mother, she sometimes does alterations. Where do you come from?"  
  
Shephard gave a slow, sarcastic grin. "The greatest country on earth, or so they say."  
  
James felt his stomach tighten up. "You're a damn sight dumber than you look," he snapped. "People around here are liable to kick your ass for that kind of attitude."  
  
"Will you?"  
  
"Maybe."  
  
"I'll take that under advisement. I meant it anyway, James."  
  
Something about the way he said his name, so serious and quiet, rumbled quick through him, and he couldn't put his finger on what that feeling was except strange and real. No, not real, he told himself. High. That had to be it. But Shephard was still looking at him, too earnestly, and it made him nervous.  
  
James said, "Didn't sound like it."  
  
"Here's what you might not believe: I love this country. If I didn't, I wouldn't waste my time trying to get people to care about what's happening to it. I'd just go to Canada."  
  
Scornfully, he said, "You love your country?"  
  
"Yeah. But I don’t always like it, you know?"  
  
"Whatever," James replied, even if he thought he might know what Shephard meant. "How in the hell does a person manage to be a rich protester type? What does your father do?"  
  
"Specifically, operate on people. More generally, kick me out of the house and threaten my tuition."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"They're so conservative it's practically criminal. Or at least criminally insane."  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"If it wasn't such a prestigious position I got for myself, they might have cut me off altogether. But I guess they think if I can't be a good person, I can at least be the kind of enemy that looks good on a resume."  
  
"Enemy?"  
  
"Didn't you know—the world divides into those that support LBJ and those that are going to hell."  
  
"There's only one place that's hell, and people go there whether they voted for President Johnson or not." Shephard didn’t nod, but he didn't have to, given the way his eyes soberly agreed. James added, "In fact, I'd bet most of them didn't."  
  
"I did," Shephard said softly.  
  
"What?"  
  
"I was just legal. Just barely old enough." He frowned. "Just stupid enough, too, to think he knew what he was doing."  
  
"I don't suppose you're gonna tell me why you turned from a Johnson man to a…" He raised his eyebrows at him.  
  
"Depends," he replied with a sly smile. "Do you know where I can get some beer?"  
  
Slightly taken aback, but covering that shock pretty well, James said, "I could definitely point you in the right direction. Where you staying?"  
  
"The big hotel out on the highway. Just like the other speakers."  
  
"That was nice of them."  
  
"Couldn't afford to make it look like they take me about as seriously as you do. But, really, I'm staying with some new friends. On…" He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and squinted at it. "Maple...? Okay, so that word can't possibly be what I think it is."  
  
"Maple Court?" James asked with a chuckle. Then he gave an internal snort: more trust-fund kids, biding their time in school. That misread word wasn't actually so far off, from what he knew. "That's only a few blocks from here."  
  
"Good. My car's at the hotel, anyway."  
  
They had stood up, and they paused there, staring mostly at the ground. Time to part or time to move forward, and James would be damned if he admitted how much he wanted to stay in the man's company. Really, he didn't know why he did, so it was easier to simply let it be Shephard's decision, as if it didn't matter to him.   
  
Finally, Shephard nodded his head. He said, "It might be nice to get rid of them for a while. If you don't mind playing host."  
  
He shook his head. "You sure?"  
  
"They've been chauffeuring me around all day, and by now I know enough about this town and this university to write a book about it. A very boring book." He looked at James out of the corner of his eye. "No offense. Anyway, they'll be too stoned to care in a little while. And I think I'd kind of like to have a drink with you. You might actually show me something interesting."  
  
"I know just the place, then. We can walk, too. It's just up the main drag there."  
  
"Then I'll go tell them I'll catch up with them later," he replied, walking down the sidewalk. Then he stopped and did a turn, swinging his arms a bit and continuing to walk backward as he said: "So…remind me, so I can explain it to them: why am I going to what will undoubtedly be a roughneck bar with a person who definitely thinks I'm a moron?"  
  
"Because you're a smart moron and I'm not a roughneck."  
  
Shephard grinned at him oddly, the kind of smile he really did think he felt all along his nerves, in a way that might've been good if it wasn't so disconcerting.   
  
"I never said you were."  
  
James paused and watched him slink out of the alley, back toward his friends, before he followed him out into the lamplight of the Quad, completely unsure of where he was going, even if he knew exactly where his feet were taking him.


	2. Chapter 2

  
_Someone told me long ago there's a calm before the storm,  
I know; its been comin' for some time.  
When its over, so they say, it'll rain a sunny day,  
I know; shinin' down like water._

\--"Have You Ever Seen the Rain?" Creedence Clearwater Revival

  
  
  
Jack Shephard loosened his tie, but something made him leave it around his neck rather than pull it off and shove it into his pocket.   
  
He often looked at his life and wondered how he'd gotten where he was—literally and otherwise—and this day, this night, was no exception. Walking down a small, strange, almost quaint street, nothing like the scenery he was used to, it occurred to him that this was probably the best the town had to offer in the way of night life. People hung out of doorways, tripping out into the evening from bars and restaurants. It was just plain surreal. This crowded, dirty little town was no place his life in California had prepared him for, yet here he was, walking through the heavy night air like he was cutting it with his body and feeling something like electricity—in the breeze, in the productive static in his head—crackling through him. It was entirely possible that at some point, he'd developed the habit of courting the bizarre, if only because it made him feel alive.   
  
The campus itself was gorgeous, and Jack was glad that for a while James had simply let him soak up the scenery. There were venerable colleges everywhere, and he'd spoken at a lot of them, but there was something tangibly different about being down here. It was easy to think of the region as some backward third world country, except there were people in it who looked like him and spoke about some of the same things if not in the same accents. This was still America, wasn't it? Surely there were hippies and patriots and oblivious masses here as well as there were anywhere. The south probably wasn't as terribly different as he needed to believe it was.  
  
Yet it was plenty different. No region anywhere else had campuses that seemed to press in on a person with so many ghosts and so much history. Maybe the Ivies, but they had a different vibe altogether. Here, it was almost the same feeling as he'd had when he took that trip to England: a weight of years, struggles. He knew he was romanticizing things, and, to be sure, this school wasn't as thick with it as Ole Miss, but when he'd stared across that Quad, he had felt something.   
  
As they had walked down the boulevard, away from the academic heart of the university, they'd passed rows of fraternity houses, reminding him of the tenuous but necessary ties he still kept to his brothers, at least the ones who hadn't written him off entirely. The monolithic football stadium towered appropriately behind those houses. Football wasn't Jack's favorite sport, but he wasn't unaware of where he was and the kind of hold the game had on the region. He recalled hearing his student handlers that day talking about how the university's program had stumbled for the first time in years. His own Bruins, however, had produced a Heisman winner the previous season. He hadn't said a word, but when James saw him eyeing the landscape, he snorted a laugh and lit up a cigarette, not deigning to comment. Jack wondered if he did so because he liked football or didn't give a damn about it. There was no telling.  
  
James had held out the pack, and Jack shook his head. He was keyed up enough without a cigarette. That was why he'd taken the chance on pulling out that joint; he needed something to take the edge off. Speaking to students was his most important job, but it was the one he liked the least, perhaps because a part of him craved it. He was good at it, he knew. He was clever, and he had a touch of preacher in him—a cadence to his speech, when he chose to keep it, that lulled people in and kept them. These speaking engagements were where he felt like his position meant something. Sure, he'd lobbied in front of congress, but they didn't take him very seriously. To them, he was just one in a long line of anti-establishment punks trying to tell them they were blind; they didn't tend to appreciate that. On the other hand, when he spoke to students, he knew he was sometimes the only voice of opposition they'd ever been allowed to hear, and they were often willing to listen. He took that seriously. Apparently, that didn't mean he had to feel all that calm about doing it.   
  
This speaking trip was like a lot of others, but then again it wasn't. This evening was looking to be a far cry from casual lunches with state representatives and afternoons spent on the telephone with mayors and deans. They had weaved out of the center of campus and into the off-campus strip, then down into the real life of this southern town, as the sidewalks overrun with undergraduates turned to open spaces again, not the granite and green of the campus but concrete, cool and bright in the street lights, with only a few doors falling open, music drifting out.   
  
It was in front of one such place that they stopped. An old black man sat in the doorway, smoking.  
  
"Jimmy Lowe," James said with a nod and a wide smile, tossing the butt of his cigarette in the gutter. "Ain't it past your bedtime?"   
  
"Aw, hell," Jimmy said, rolling his eyes for effect.  
  
"What you doing up here at Bobby's?"  
  
Jimmy looked as if he'd answer, but he was also casting a wary eye on the stranger in the suit. He said, "Who you got there?"   
  
These people and their fear of strangers, he thought.  
  
"Jackson Shephard," James replied. "From out of town."  
  
Jimmy just nodded, and finally and thankfully took his eyes off Jack, redirecting his attention to James. "You keep your eye on Glinda, now. She'll take your damn head off tonight."  
  
"Well, what's new."  
  
Jimmy gave them both a vague smile, then his face darkened again and he muttered, "Out of the frying pan into the fire." Then jerking his head up to look at James, he said, "Got a smoke you wanna share?"   
  
James handed one over, and Jack had a feeling this was a common enough occurrence. Jack was both content to absorb the scene but also uncomfortable with observing; he clearly didn't belong there. Thankfully, James nodded at Jimmy again and stepped through the doorway, and Jack just followed behind him.  
  
As they settled in at a bar that looked a lot like every other bar he'd ever been in, from Seattle to Boston to Miami to L.A., he asked James, "What was that about? The frying pan thing?"  
  
James gave a small smile, his head dipped forward. "Jimmy only hangs around up here if he gets into shit with his buddies down at the Cloakroom. Apparently, he also pissed off Glinda somehow. Not that that's hard to do."  
  
"Glinda?" he asked.  
  
James motioned toward the back, behind the pool tables, where a small negro woman with eyes threatening enough to make up for her size sat in a chair, leaned back against the wall, smoking and talking to a tipsy-seeming white man leaning over the table in front of her.  
  
"You'd think she owned the place. Tommy gets enough whiskey in him, she can damn near convince him she does."  
  
Jack wanted to ask about how a place like this could even exist down here, with whites and negroes sharing the same space, but he didn't want to offend him. He was also relatively certain James wouldn't have a good answer for him.  
  
"So, you hang out here a lot," Jack said. James shrugged his shoulders.   
  
Jack was already becoming rather enthralled by the man's defensive mechanisms, how in lieu of being able to keep his reactions and thoughts to himself, he found ways to gloss something over them to distract or confuse a person. Or at least he tried. After that bit of weed and after the long, mostly silent walk, James was a lot more subdued than he'd even been when they met. There seemed to be so much more to cover over in his expression now, but less desire to do so.  
  
Not that that stopped these mechanisms of his entirely. When the bartender ambled toward them, sticking out his hand to shake with James, he watched him put on as gregarious a face as he'd ever seen out of him.   
  
Jack ordered what James ordered, some cheap beer that thankfully had a little kick to it. After James took a long swallow from his bottle, he said, "I'll be back," and disappeared toward the back of the bar. He watched his progress long enough to see Glinda frown at James as her eyes cut to the front. Whatever James said to her, she gave him a half-exasperated but ultimately indulgent face and went back to listening to the ramblings of the strange drunk white man in front of her.   
  
He didn't know whether to try small talk with the bartender, a white man named Frank, but the man apparently decided that for him. As the bar was mostly empty, he stayed right where he was and commenced to straightening and cleaning.  
  
After a respectable silence, Frank said, "So, you enjoying our weather?"  
  
"I don't know yet. I- I don't think I'm used to it. Not that it isn't beautiful down here."  
  
The man nodded. It seemed like an acceptable enough mixture of truth and lie. In reality, nothing about that part of the state was beautiful, nothing he'd seen, anyway.  
  
"Where do you hail from?"  
  
"California," he said. That usually earned him either stares or frowns.   
  
This man, however, simply nodded again. "Huh. Weather different out there?"  
  
"It's warmer this time of year. And it's not as humid."  
  
At that, he chuckled. "You should be here in July, then. You'd swear you were in a jungle or something."  
  
It was funny, Jack thought, how he could go give a long talk about activism and politics without his thoughts going where they started to go at just that mention of a jungle. Something, maybe their earlier conversation, made him glance toward the back of the bar, his eyes searching for James's now familiar silhouette. Suddenly, some of the tension in his brain made sense, although just as quickly, he put it out of his mind—or at least on a commonly-used back burner—because he saw that James was standing huddled over a telephone, his eyebrows creased and his fingers drumming against the wall.   
  
He was profoundly curious to know who James was talking to, but not curious enough to ask. However, he glanced past James to the narrow back hallway, noting the men's room at the end, and his bladder took that opportunity to remind him that he'd drunk half a pitcher of water sitting beside the podium earlier, waiting to speak.   
  
It wasn't prying if he legitimately had to go to the bathroom, was it? Of course it was. He sighed to himself, but he got up anyway.  
  
"Restroom in the back?" he said. Frank just nodded.  
  
He launched himself through the smoky air, running the gauntlet of a pool tables and Glinda's cool gaze, then he passed James without much more than a glance and let himself into the bathroom.  
  
He was shocked to realize how well he could hear the conversation through the thin walls.  
  
"…you'll-- Yes, I know. It's not that big a deal. You'll-- Momma, you have got to calm down, okay? Call uncle Richard. You can-- No. No, no. I realize that. …then you wouldn't have to… Momma. Momma, you listen to me. You're not listening. You're not—" There was a long pause, and Jack almost thought the conversation had somehow ended, but then James's voice came back. "Late. Yes. …pot roast enough for…in the…"  
  
Jack finally began to feel like he was intruding on a private family matter, which he was, so he relieved himself, washed his hands, and strode back out into the bar. James was already back in his place, chatting with Frank, downing his beer.  
  
Frank backed off, floated down the bar to the other end as Jack took up his place on his stool again.   
  
James said, "Sorry 'bout that. Had to check in."  
  
"Girlfriend?"  
  
James gave him an eyeroll to rival all others. "Mother."  
  
Jack couldn't help but grin. "It's fine."  
  
"I guess I take care of her," James added. Tapping out another cigarette from the pack, he said, "Hope this is the sort of thing you wanted." He gestured to the room around them.  
  
"What?"  
  
"You didn't say where you wanted to drink."  
  
"Oh. This is fine. There's a bar near campus that I go to sometimes that's a lot like this, just more crowded."  
  
"I hate crowded bars. That's why I come here. Sure as hell ain't for the scenery."  
  
"Well, it's certainly nice to be in a place where I don't have to shout over the noise."  
  
"If you start to miss the noise, they got a decent jukebox over there."  
  
He'd seen it when he came in, and he had to admit he was curious to know what was on it and what James would play. He assumed James was just as curious about him, especially when he just nodded at it like his mentioning it was something of a request. Jack found himself walking over with a fistful of change.  
  
When he came back, James made a valiant effort at not acknowledging his choices except with an initial comment that he'd given them background music. They made slow and surprisingly strained small talk for a while, through what he hoped were relatively safe choices: a Jimi Hendrix song he liked, some not old but not too new Beatles. Then Otis Redding came on and James trailed off mid-sentence.   
  
His eyes sparkled when he said, "You feeling contemplative tonight, Jack?"  
  
"It's sort of my default position," he said with a shrug and a sheepish grin.  
  
James just snorted. Then he said with a smirk, "You ever even been on a dock?"  
  
"I have." He paused, considering, then he said, "And I've probably caught more fish in a season than you've caught in your whole life."  
  
That did the trick. James's face lit into a smile, and inexplicably, this quiet song drove them up out of whatever funk they'd gotten themselves into on their walk.   
  
Propelled into animated conversation, they talked fishing, the differences between ocean and lake, and about why they didn't care for hunting. James wasn't particularly bothered by his next choices from the jukebox, some comparatively innocuous Dylan then a random Stones B-side, which James acknowledged mid-sentence with only a wave of his hand and a grin, saying, "Whatever points you earned with Glinda before, I think you're burning them now."  
  
"I'll survive."  
  
After Jack found himself educated as to country music—"at least the shit worth listening to"—and James programmed some of what he liked best into the jukebox, they meandered over a lot of topics, and he found that he didn't so much care what James was saying as long as he could listen to his drawl and watch his face while he spoke. The man was somehow even more blunt with a little alcohol in his system, but he was also less confrontational. It rather shocked Jack because they'd known each other only a couple of hours, yet the man was now treating him like a friend. It made Jack wonder if this wasn't another façade. Yet something about the man's demeanor seemed as honest as anything Jack was used to dealing with.   
  
Whatever this was, he tried not to worry over it. This was just drinks with a guy he would never see again in his life, who he had no need to impress.  
  
Of course, he'd thought the same thing about Marc, and that turned out a lot different than he'd imagined. He felt a flush come over his cheeks for no reason, because the very comparison between the two was bizarre; but looking at James, he really could see it. Same rough demeanor that gave way to easiness. Same apparent problem cutting the apron strings. What hit him in the gut was the way James could laugh the same way Marc had: calmly, like amusement was costly, even if his eyes sparkled and flashed.  
  
James said, "You play pool?"  
  
"Not very well."  
  
"You wanna get better?"  
  
"Sure."  
  
"Well, then, come on. Get you some practice. You're lucky I'd rather take it easy tonight than hustle you."  
  
So Jack smiled, but only to bite back his apprehension. He downed the rest of his beer and ordered another and followed James to the back. He had finished that third beer before James could get the balls racked.  
  
James insisted on watching him clear the table on his own first, just to see the way he shot. He sat perched on a bar stool, smoking and watching Jack circle the table more nervously than he'd care to admit. It didn't help that he'd gotten himself half tipsy to combat the waning of a buzz that hadn't really been much of a buzz anyway. He tried and tried to make this pool game loose and fun, enjoy the bewilderment of being in this place and time. All he had to do was be Jackson Shephard. But nothing in the world about having the alternately brooding and charming James Ford staring down his back was doing anything for his nerves or his concentration, much less his ability to put on an easy persona.  
  
He'd had James rack for nine ball—less balls to deal with, better for one person to play. He pocketed the first three without much fuss, but then the four simply refused to fall into any of the pockets on the table. Jack knew; he'd tried them all and was still futilely bouncing the ball off rails, and the longer he did, the less possible it seemed to put it in.   
  
He stood directly in front of James, with his back to him and his head bowed low, poised to take yet another go at it, when James broke the steady silence. He drawled, "You're too impatient."  
  
He made a snorting sound. Such an idea had been ludicrous only a few years ago. But lately he kept getting hit with the realization that the man he'd grown up to be wasn't the person he thought he would be, who he was when he still lived in his father's house, unhappily but compliantly in his shadow but somehow beyond the man's notice until he stepped out of it.   
  
"I'm serious," James said. "You don't set up right. Hell, you don't even steady yourself before you let the cue fly."  
  
He slid off the stool, depositing his bottle on the bar as he did. He moved to the head of the table, not even laying his hands on it, just standing there. He said, "You're gonna try a couple things. One, actually get down there and see your shot, don't just take a stab at it. Two, count to three before you shoot."  
  
Jack bent over the table, making a good show at trying to line the shot up properly, which wasn't particularly easy to do with a fourth beer in his system. Still leaned over, forearms on the railing, he turned his head and looked up at him. "We could just play darts. I'm good at darts."  
  
"So am I."  
  
Jack smiled and reluctantly lined up his shot again, then he counted out loud, "One, two, three."   
  
He tapped the cue ball decisively, and it felt like a good shot, but the four didn't fall into the corner. It did, however, clatter through most of the rest of the balls on the table before dribbling into the side pocket—which was not at all that one at which he'd been aiming.  
  
James rubbed his hand over the stubble on his chin, the rasping sound like a part of his appraisal of Jack's demeanor. Then he pulled the ball back out of the pocket and put it on the spot in the center of the table. "Three, don't try to smart ass any of it or the balls will know."  
  
"They will?" he said with a skeptical grin.  
  
"They're like dogs," he groused. "Or kids." James regarded him rather seriously for a moment, then he grinned, the kind of smile that could warm a person from the inside out. "You just don't have the right amount of control."  
  
Like a hand reached in and squeezed at his chest, Jack felt something tighten his heart then let go, leaving it thumping hard against the inside of his ribs once, twice; and he knew all at once that he was in more trouble than he'd even bothered to realize he could be in, not down here. Surely not down here, away from everything familiar, where he should have even more power over his crazy emotions and hormones.   
  
He mumbled, "You have no idea."   
  
James just raised one eyebrow and picked up the other cue. "You mind if I knock a few around?"  
  
Jack nodded. Playing him couldn't be as bad as him scrutinizing his every move.   
  
They played several games of eight ball for the next hour or so—slowly. James was apparently either not as good a player as teacher or purposefully not taking things very seriously. He did, however, seem to take time to set up his shots, perhaps out of habit, and consequently he beat Jack in every game, eventually.   
  
Not that the score mattered. At least they were playing as though it didn't. After that initial lesson, they talked about everything but pool, except when Jack would stand back from the table and look at James, silently asking his advice, and James would cock his head to the side, studying things before he spit out a number.   
  
Jack was a competitive person, and he knew, somehow, that James was too. Perhaps that's why they very pointedly didn't talk about the games or put much effort into them. That way it wouldn't mean anything. Every so often, James would get this gleam in his eye, and when Jack sunk a shot, he felt a momentary surge of pride, but he knew that they were really just walking around the table, doing something with their hands while they drank beer and got to know each other.   
  
Jack was used to intense discussions about politics in corner booths or lazy, lolling conversations about nothing as he lay on the floor, high. He was not at all used to a dialogue that seemed to wind tighter and tighter into itself, that brought the two of them steadily closer, like two cats circling each other, even when the things they talked about were casual, their tones mostly quiet, except for the occasional outburst.  
  
Like when Jack mentioned something about his car off hand, and James nearly choked on his beer.  
  
"You drive a Chevelle?"   
  
"Yeah. I mean, I didn't drive it here. But I have one. It's not new or anything." James was looking at him like he was an alien, so he added, "And it's kind of a…mess."  
  
"Still," James said. "Have you seen what they've done with them now?"  
  
"Haven't had the chance to look inside one yet, but—"  
  
"You work on cars?"  
  
"I don't know very much, but yeah. I helped my friend Marc rebuild the engine on mine, which is the only reason I've got that car, by the way. A friend of my father's gave it up for dead. Turns out it just needed someone to treat it properly, work out some kinks."  
  
"You like fixing cars?"  
  
He shrugged. "I like fixing anything I can."  
  
"That's funny. Me, I was always one to take stuff apart. Still do sometimes. Toasters. Telephones. The reason I ask about the car… I work at an auto shop part time."  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"Change oil, mostly. Brake pads, that kind of thing."  
  
"Sounds nice."  
  
"It's messy work. But, yeah, I've played around with some impressive machinery."  
  
"What else do you do?"  
  
"Clean the school," he mumbled. "Used to do some roofing."  
  
"I bet that's fun," he said with a grimace.  
  
"Only if you can't take the weather. Otherwise, it's kinda nice being on top of a house. Peaceful. It's not so bad working with your hands. Gives a man's mind time to do what it needs to."  
  
"Yeah," he said with a nod. "What made you stop?"  
  
"Long story."  
  
James frowned to himself, then he smiled enigmatically and went back to the game. Jack watched his lanky frame drape over the table as he sunk the fifteen, then he walked around the table and methodically put in the last two stripes. Serious playing, finally. It was impressive to watch.   
  
James took aim at the eight, to win the game, with the ball poised just off the rail halfway between the corner pockets. He called the nearer of the two. It was a scratch shot, just as likely to send the cue ball into the opposite pocket as it was to sink the eight, and if Jack saw it, there was no way James couldn't have. But he took the shot anyway, and the black ball slammed neatly into the pocket he'd called. However, the cue ball also whipped into the other pocket—a scratch; James had lost the game.   
  
He lay his cue on the table with a controlled snap and scowled. Jack could almost feel James shutting down into himself, the charged but easy flow of words and expressions between them all but stopped. James strode back over to the bar and picked up his beer, downing the rest of it in one long gulp.  
  
"I hate to win that way," Jack said finally.  
  
"Well, I hate to lose that way," he replied, his voice almost a bark. "You mind if we get out of here?"  
  
"Okay," Jack said.   
  
Then his stomach dropped for no reason he could make sense of. If he was honest with himself, it was because he would have rather been there, engaged in this push and pull, even dealing with James's sudden turn to a bad mood, than reentering the world of bullshit and stoners. But he wasn't quite honest with himself; he told himself he'd simply had too much beer on an empty stomach. There had to be a reason for this vague feeling of dis-ease and disorientation.  
  
Jack nodded, as if to himself. He said, "Yeah. I've got…a lot of meetings and things tomorrow. Early. Placate the student government and all. Should probably go back."  
  
James's cool blue gaze dug into him, flipped up along his jawline and settled in his eyes. "Oh," he said quietly.  
  
"What?"  
  
"I don't know. I didn't mean-- I just thought maybe it would be nice to get some air, do some more walking. I'm feeling restless tonight."  
  
James's eyes weren't imploring him at all—in fact, they were working so hard not to that Jack could see something dark and wild in his expression—and that's probably why Jack just nodded his head and followed him out the door, pausing just outside the threshold to take off his tie and put it into his pocket.   
  
The negro man was gone, and there was a feeling in the air that he was sure meant rain, even though the stars were still twinkling far above the streetlights.  
  
*****  
  
Jack was drunk.  
  
He wasn't sure how it happened, but the more he walked, the drunker he felt. Not rip-roaring drunk, not even the sort where he said things he didn't meant to. (He'd always been able to think quite clearly, even when he was quite intoxicated.) He was just physically a little off balance, and it didn't at all help matters that he could no longer avoid the realization that he wanted to latch onto James and not let go.  
  
He wasn't sure what he wanted out of him, although whatever it was would be impossible. At first he thought he wanted to lean into him just to steady himself, but he knew he really longed to hold James down and taste him, lick his tongue up over the stubble on his jaw or suck at the soft skin on his strong, tanned wrists. Or maybe it  _was_  about wanting James to steady him, because some part of him wanted James to hold him down, too, and do with him what he would.   
  
But that part was never allowed to be in control of Dr. Christian Shephard's son, wayward as he might be. Actually, he was not, in reality, as wayward as his parents or any of their friends suspected. If he'd fooled around with guys before—and he had, once or twice—it was never about actually wanting them much as it was proving he could, proving he wasn't backward or afraid.  
  
It didn't mean he didn't freak himself out in the aftermath, as something like self-loathing mixed with confusion went coursing through him, when he let himself think about the implications of what he'd done. The actuality of it, though, left him more curiously bewildered than ashamed. And being able to kiss those guys didn't mean he didn't wonder if the only reason he might be attracted to the same sex was because it would be the only thing that could make his father more angry than him being the NSA president, supposedly in cahoots with people who might very well be communists. Certainly not good democrats.   
  
But one thing he knew: he wasn't speaking out against the war because of his fucking father.   
  
Christian Shephard, he felt sure, would not appreciate drunkenly walking down this empty residential street, watching the night sky rise up in front of him as he and James skirted the campus and all its noise and headed down toward the river. (Christian Shephard preferred to get drunk in the privacy of his own home, and he never saw much he liked to look at when he was.) Christian Shephard would look at James and dismiss him as a small-town hick. Jack could feel a part of his father inside of him insisting the same thing, asking him serious questions about sanity and safety and  _why?_  and  _how?_  and  _what are you searching for down there, out there?_  That was the perpetual question in his father's eyes, every time he let himself go out to the house anymore. But tonight it might have been,  _what do you want out of this strange, reticent man?_  
  
Truth was, he didn't really know, but he wouldn't have stopped walking for the world.  
  
They couldn't see the river. Even if they'd been able to walk close enough to it to look down its banks, everything would be merely darkly brown, subtle glints of light flashing with the slip and rush of the water. He knew it wasn't a pretty river (he'd passed it coming in), so he was rather glad to simply hear it; it comforted him in some odd way to know it was there. It made the pinching in his feet from the dress shoes he wore bearable. It wasn't like they were walking very fast, anyway, not that Jack could tell—he was in a bit of a haze, and the cool, heavy breeze over his skin was the only thing that penetrated. He watched a strange gloom of obtuse clouds edge in on the stars, but it felt like an empty threat, somehow, as if it couldn't possibly rain on a night like this. And then there were James's piercing eyes when he turned and commented about some aspect of the campus or the town that was actually worth knowing, and Jack found it hard to turn away and stop looking at him.   
  
He felt happily unstable, something so internal it didn't show in the way he moved. He wondered if he'd been flirting with James all night. He didn't know. He wasn't sure he knew what flirting was, not with men; he did know that if it was good it required both people to do it. That settled it. That more than settled it, actually, because Jack held his breath, stomach tight against his diaphragm as he walked; he knew exactly where he stood: even so much as laying his eyes over the man's body the way he wanted to would be…  
  
Not down here. Not anywhere, really, but certainly not with this man.   
  
James strode beside him, those long legs falling in step with his own, and Jack felt like maybe his father would be right; this was foolish, a little dangerous. Things were too possible. Since they'd stepped into that alleyway earlier, James had smiled a sort of smile at him that didn’t come from humoring a person. It came from evaluating and appraising, accepting. Sometimes, guys like this didn't even know what they felt. Jack hadn't known it about himself for years, only recognized it looking back. Still, it boiled down to this: if James had a fucking clue how possible it was for Jack to stop right now and kiss him like he meant it—even if the more true and possible it was, the less likely it became—it could mean nothing but something really, really ugly. These were violent people, especially when you spat on their certainties about the universe, when you tried to push them into doing something their guts told them was wrong.  
  
Jack kept walking, watching his feet, counting his steps. He had seen his father look condescendingly on a negro doctor at the hospital once, and it had made him sick, even as he knew his father would never do anything more than coldly frown. Faced with something as aberrant as homosexuality, even his son's, he'd manage himself similarly, keep himself so under control that no one in the world would fault him. They should, but they wouldn't.   
  
They might not even fault a man like James, either, for reacting the way he'd been taught to. This man he walked beside would probably break his jaw if he knew the sorts of things Jack was thinking. Jack would find himself falling here, on the cold shoulder of this dark road, the river dark below him, swirling silent and sinister, speaking out how Jack was really, after all, pretty fucked up.   
  
Jack shivered as the wind cut into him, as the last patch of stars were finally obscured by the clouds. This was crazy, and he wasn't sure what worried him more: that James could be capable of that sort of quick and thoughtless violence, or that he himself even believed it possible, here where the silence threaded between them and weaved itself around them so comfortably and James seemed much more stable than any of his friends at home. Complex; maybe a little difficult. But real.   
  
Startling him out of his thoughts, James suddenly motioned to a road that cut up through campus. "We should head back that way before it rains on us."  
  
"You think it will?"  
  
"Uh huh."   
  
James followed the curve of the sidewalk, and Jack followed him. Just hearing James's smooth voice started to work at loosening the knot of fear in Jack's gut, and he was halfway ashamed of himself for being paranoid.   
  
He found, as they walked, that he began to see the campus through James's eyes—the eyes of a person who saw this place as from the outside, which apparently made for an odd combination of cynicism and romanticism. James spoke derisively of the students but never for a moment lost this particular look on his face, like he was passing through these grounds without his feet actually coming in contact with the concrete, as though he knew he didn't belong and didn't begrudge it. It was funny, but Jack felt the same way just then, the alcohol muffling him up into himself, so that he floated outside the scene, like he could watch the two of them walking, and they looked like they belonged to each other but not to the world they walked in.  
  
What impressed Jack the most was how James might've been clearly out of place on the campus, but he was still so comfortable in his own skin. Jack loved the way he moved, and it was only partially about the tenuously held lust he had for him. James's movements were circumscribed, reigned in, even as they were smooth and sure. He gave off the impression of a person doing that kids' party game, balancing an egg on a spoon in front of him, trying to keep it from falling and cracking open. Except this person pinched a cigarette in the other hand and swayed in a way that made that continuing balance, restraint, seem exceptional.  
  
Jack had always been a watcher. It was the easiest way to be when your life was built up with fitting in—into your family, your lifestyle, your group of friends, your small bubble of the world. Even when Jack began to travel after his graduation, he still spent most of his time watching. Jack had been the master at absorbing and adapting, but when it came time for him to step up and direct his own life, finally, he didn’t really know how to do it.  
  
Somewhere along the way, he stopped watching, and he wondered now, as he followed James down these concrete paths through short, neat grass, if that was such a good thing. Maybe he should be watching more. Or maybe he just yearned for it now because it was easier than being himself sometimes. Tonight, he felt like he could forever watch James walk and listen to him rattle on, loose and snide, about this complicated world that stacked up in brick buildings all around the both of them now, pressing them out, drawing them in.  
  
James stopped suddenly, to cup his hand around a match and get it to stay lit.  
  
As he moved on, he said, "I'd've never believed you were this quiet."  
  
"Quiet?"  
  
"Ain't said a word since"—he spun and pointed at the courtyard between the buildings they'd passed through a couple blocks back—"way back yonder." James's accent thickened and his vocabulary seemed to fall into entropy as the night progressed. Jack was beginning to find it rather charming.  
  
"Maybe I haven't been able to get a word in edgewise," he said with what he hoped was the right sort of smile. It was.  
  
After a moment, James said, "Maple Court, yeah?"  
  
"Where I'm staying?"  
  
"Yeah." After a pause, he said, "You know, it still don't make any damn sense to me."   
  
"What?"  
  
"How come your daddy hates what you're doing so much, but your rich friends on Maple Court don't seem to mind you being the champion of the long-hairs?"  
  
"I'm not the 'champion of the long-hairs.' A lot of them just happen to agree with me is all. And you've gotta stop assuming how much money a person makes has anything to do with what he believes."  
  
"But doesn't it?"  
  
"Sometimes. For my parents' generation. But ours is—"  
  
"Ours?"  
  
"Yeah." James looked at him skeptically, so he added, "You're only what? Four, five years younger than me? Don't act like you live on another planet or something. We're both young Americans living in a problematic era, dealing with the same shit."  
  
"Shit?" he said with a giggle. "You sound so damn funny spitting out curses, you know."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"Because you say 'shit' in the same breath as 'problematic era.'"  
  
"Sorry."  
  
"Not a problem. You just forget you're not on stage sometimes, don't you?"  
  
He shrugged, trying to keep the blood from rising to his face.   
  
James added, "I'm not saying that's horrible. But sometimes it seems like you've got more idealism than you do sense."  
  
"Wait a minute. Earlier, you were accusing me of trying to destroy this country. Now I'm idealistic?"  
  
"I didn't say your ideas were right, did I?"  
  
"Whatever."  
  
"Yeah, whatever. You've got eyes that sort of look around wide as saucers, you know? Funny thing is, you see just what you want to see, and you think you can fix things with big phrases like 'Our Generation' and 'America' and other things you just don’t…"  
  
"What?" Jack said.  
  
"Nevermind."  
  
Jack let it go. He didn't want to, but he did. This thing between them, this odd camaraderie, wasn't all that easy, certainly not easy enough to risk fracturing it suddenly. The evening had sprung from honesty, back when it wasn't a threat, when they didn't know each other, but things had changed. He didn't know when, precisely, but he knew he wouldn't go back. He liked knowing him. He'd learned to like having someone to bounce ideas off of, who forced him to have ideas of his own.   
  
In Marc's garage or on the patio at his parents' house, they had talked for hours about politics and baseball and God only remembers what else, and they spent so much time arguing about the world that they could do it by shorthand, in waves of their hands or slaps of their palms against a fender or a glass table, rattling the umbrella in the center. They could argue so loudly they kept his parents awake, or so quietly because they were almost dead on their feet. Sometimes, they argued with smiles on their faces and until they either collapsed with laughter or the discussion just dissipated, leaving them behind, looking at each other and probably making more sense of each other than anyone else in their lives could.   
  
It could be good, knowing a person like that, but when Jack thought about the possibility of knowing James that way, it almost made him laugh out loud. It shouldn't have; it was actually far less crazy than thinking about wanting to touch him. James wasn't Marc—not by a long shot—but there was something about the way Jack was around him, how his brain just settled, all the cogs sliding into place so they could turn and fly, that he felt had to be about the man himself and not the kind of ghosts his laughter brought forth. Surely it couldn't be that Jack was simply seeing what he wanted to see.  
  
Whatever it was, he was more than a little crazy to be overanalyzing things so much when he would get on a plane the next evening and never, ever dream of coming back.  
  
He was almost back to his friends' house, then, and it suddenly felt like there were too many things to say.  
  
"What you were saying before…" Jack started. "You still think I'm full of shit. Empty words."  
  
"You don't mean to be."  
  
"But you think I am?"  
  
"I didn't take you out drinking to get in your business."  
  
"I know that. But I wanna hear what you think."  
  
James sighed, then he said, "I think life is a hell of a lot more complicated than you make it out to be. Like…well, in your speech. You can't just tell students to start protesting when they don't like something. They don't like  _anything_."  
  
"They hate the war."  
  
"Some of them. But protesting the war ain't gonna do nothing, either."  
  
"But you  _do_  think it's a bad war?"  
  
"I don't know."  
  
"You don't know?"  
  
"What I said."  
  
"See, I think you do know. And that's what I don't get. I don't understand why some people don't like what we're doing over there, but they won't say the war's bad."  
  
"It's not that simple."  
  
"It is for me."  
  
"Well, I'd love to be you, then, inside your head where things are black and white. I really would."  
  
"That's what's crazy, you know. I thought you people—"  
  
"Lord, here's the 'you people' again."  
  
Jack huffed out a breath, rubbing his hands over his face. "I really thought that people down here divided the world into black and white. I mean metaphorically, not…racially, although that works, too. The way the south always looks in the national news… I though you put everything into neat categories so you could understand them, and you do, and that's why you're just a little nuts." James started a little at that word, but he was still rather stoically listening. "Everything in this world is shades of gray anymore, but it's like you turn a blind eye to that."  
  
" _I_  don't."  
  
"Then, fine, I'm talking about  _some_  southerners, then. Like that." He gestured to one of the many Confederate flags he'd seen hanging over front doors, in windows, in the next second hoping to God had hadn't just committed some incredible blasphemy without even thinking about it.   
  
"Confederate flag," James said, apparently unfazed.  
  
"I know what it is. What I don't know is why you all still hang them. You lost."  
  
James's forehead creased, but he stuttered out a sardonic laugh. "We do realize that."  
  
"Do you?"  
  
"You think we're sitting down here waiting for the south to rise again?"  
  
"Are you?"  
  
"I'm not."  
  
"Then why keep this thing around?"  
  
James was quiet for a moment, and Jack listened to the sounds of their shoes slapping the sidewalk. James said, "It's not about winners or losers. It's about people. My great-great-grandfather died in that war."  
  
"So?"  
  
James's eyes went a little darker, but he sighed, gathering his thoughts before he stopped and stared into Jack's eyes, pausing so long it made Jack nervous. He could hear the beat of his heart pounding in his ears.  
  
James finally said, "Do you think there's anything worthwhile about Alabama?"  
  
"Sure."  
  
"Don’t just say it if you don't mean it."  
  
"No, no. This…" He gestured all around him, the old homes with their carefully manicured gardens. "This is beautiful. I'm sure you've got an interesting culture down here."  
  
James snorted. "Interesting. Yeah. You don't have a fucking clue what it's like to be down here. Maybe I don't love everything we do, but we're good people. We have traditions that mean a hell of a lot to us. What's wrong with wanting to remember that my state of  _our_  beautiful country doesn't just boil down to a bunch of stubborn, violent people—probably even my sainted great-great-grandfather—who thought women should be seen and not heard and negroes were like cattle? Is it just possible that there's more to this place than all that?"  
  
"Yeah. It's obviously not that easy to disentangle."  
  
"Damn right it’s not."  
  
Jack half spun and gestured back toward the house with the flag again. "But that's why you can't support…crazy things just because you want to support the people doing them." He sighed, exasperated. "I'm not even sure you can support those people if you don't respect the things they stand for."  
  
James opened his mouth, then he closed it. "Why are we talking politics?" he said through gritted teeth.  
  
"You started it."  
  
"Well, I'll finish it, then, because I really don't feel like doing this right now with you."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"You crazy?" he said. But his own eyes looked more crazy than Jack's possibly could. "Either you don't know where you are or you don't know me."  
  
"I  _don't_  know you."  
  
James gave him a hard look and walked on ahead of him, and all at once Jack felt pure driving adrenaline turn to shakiness and nerves. He watched James take a couple of drags, blowing the smoke toward his feet. Then he threw his cigarette on the ground and whirled around, apparently shocked to find Jack still standing where he'd left him.   
  
James said: "You're gonna stand there and tell me you don't care what's happening to our boys in Vietnam?"  
  
Vietnam? Jack thought. His mind had all but left that topic. The implications began to claw their way into his chest. "That's not what I said." His heart made an insistent throb of panic.  
  
"Sounded like."  
  
"I said I don’t like what they're doing and I don't like the war. I never said I don't care about people dying."  
  
"You can't just separate them out." He gestured with his hand toward the house with the flag again. "Didn't you just say that not two minutes ago? It doesn't make any damn sense. What do you want? For them to stop fighting? The minute they do, they die."  
  
"I know that."  
  
"You obviously don't. You can't just sit here and hope they'll all lay down their arms. They won't. And you can't say, 'Gee whiz, I want our soldiers to be happy and healthy, but I don't want them to raise a gun and defend themselves.'"  
  
"But it's not defense.  _We're_  the ones bombing the hell out of the country."  
  
"Maybe we should be."  
  
"Jesus Christ," Jack muttered.  
  
James stepped toward him again. "I just don't know, Jack. I don't. But I know you can't make it harder for our country to fight this war—"  
  
"I'm not—"  
  
"—with your protests and—"  
  
"But I'm not—"  
  
"—and then get up on some high horse about giving a damn about the soldiers over there."  
  
"That's why I  _do_  protest. To make things better for them."  
  
"Well, all I see you accomplishing is making their lives more difficult. They're sitting over there thinking about people like you back home with the luxury of dodging the draft who think people like them, who are trying to do what's best for the world, are crazy or just plain evil."  
  
"No…" he said, his voice croaking out a desperate note of warning.  
  
James's eyes went wide, and he shook his head as he said, "You are the dumb son of a bitch that's getting them killed."  
  
Jack's breath caught in his throat and his voice was a rasp he didn't even recognize: "Shut the fuck up," he said, then his feet were moving and his hands flew out ahead of him, catching James's shoulders. But James caught one of Jack's wrists in his hand, and their combined weight threw them off balance. They landed with a dull thud in somebody's neat front yard, Jack half on top of him with his hands still clutching at James's shoulders and neck, feeling the heat rising off him.  
  
"Shit," Jack said with a huff of breath, already in a confusion of anger and apology.  
  
At nearly the same time, James looked up at him and murmured, "Fuck."  
  
For that split second, Jack looked down into James's eyes, now a deep stormy green, but that was all he got before James jerked under him and he felt a flash of pain through his nose. He was almost simultaneously shoved off onto cool grass, his dress shoes dragging against the sidewalk as he rolled onto his back and clutched at his face.   
  
He finally felt it—a mist of rain that fell over his face and hands as he watched James push himself to his feet and go back in the direction he'd come, shaking his hand at his side. Jack had a hard head. He would have laughed if he could breathe.   
  
His face felt like something was broken. He was unwilling to get up, even though he was embarrassed at the thought that somebody might have seen that and might still be watching. Hell, somebody might call the cops. But more than anything, though, he was disoriented, physically and in some deep down place he couldn't identify yet.  
  
Jack turned his head the other direction, away from James's retreating form, and saw his pack of cigarettes lying on the ground. The first full drop of rain hit him in the temple and coursed down into his eye. He sat up slowly, the pounding in his face unbearably hot.  
  
"Jesus," he muttered, lowering his head to his knees and groping out with his hands. The matches were with the pack, but they had fallen open, too damp to strike. So he got up and walked down to the corner, trying to figure out how just far he was from where he was supposed to be.


	3. Chapter 3

_Yesterday, and days before, sun is cold and rain is hard,  
I know; been that way for all my time.  
'Til forever, on it goes through the circle, fast and slow,  
I know; it can't stop, I wonder._

\--"Have You Ever Seen the Rain?" Creedence Clearwater Revival

  
  
  
It took something pretty catastrophic to reduce James Ford to the condition he was in, striding down the street, boots slapping with a rhythmic thump against the pavement, with the light, intermittent rain in his eyes and some dark clutching at his gut. When he got to his car, he resisted the urge to kick the shit out of it. He didn't really want to, anyway. The boiling in his blood had mostly passed—that immediate blinding need to do damage to something, anything—and instead he was left with the sort of rage he was always so good at shoving down deep, so that it only curled into his fists and pounded behind his eyes.   
  
Still, it was a shock to him when he slid into the car and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He looked at his clenched jaw and wild expression and saw the evidence staring him in the face: he was his father's son. Of course, if he looked beyond the expression and at his nose and eyes and mouth, he looked so much more like his mother. He often wondered just which of them the man had been so anxious to leave. He wondered when he himself would be the one to finally go. Sometimes he felt like he never would, and that made his fists curl even tighter.  
  
His hands shook on the steering wheel as he pulled out of the parallel space and lurched toward home. There was no fixing this thing he'd done, but that was okay, and, really, he was sort of glad anyway. This Jackson Shephard would be gone soon, and he wouldn't have to think about him anymore. It was hard staring a person in the face after they saw you fall to pieces, even if just for a second. It wasn't like James had gone off on someone publicly all that many times, but every single time he had, it had stuck with him, wrapped itself around him like a clinging, parasitic vine that refused to let him go. He sure as hell didn't need any more reminder of it, certainly not Shephard's deep brown eyes staring into him.  
  
The light was on in the front window when he pulled into his driveway. His mother was surely waiting up. He had to remind himself that this wouldn't be like the last time he came home after hitting someone. He didn't have to creep into the house, tail between his legs, expecting her to scold him for losing his temper. She never had to know what had happened back there on the sidewalk; that was good because he still wasn't sure what it had really been about. He only knew that it wasn't at all as clear-cut as the punch that had gotten him fired from his roofing job. It was a feeling just as strong but not nearly as pure as the indignation he felt a few months ago as he'd stomped up the front steps and into the house, just before the woman started driving at him with her guilt and goddammed disappointment.  
  
He took his boots off and left them on the porch, and he took off his jacket, shaking the raindrops out of his hair before he pushed the door open. He hoped like hell she was asleep on the couch, and luckily she was, but as he passed through to the kitchen, he realized a part of him had almost wanted her to be awake. He still had too much nervous energy in him, so much unfocused anger that he could feel his skin tingling with it despite the way he was making himself numb and hollow with each step, each breath. He was entirely too pragmatic to let himself stay enraged. Survival required that he get good at reeling it all in.   
  
He poured himself a glass of milk and sat at the kitchen table, looking through the doorway into the living room, where she lay on the couch with a romance novel open against her stomach. Times like this, he remembered that she could be such a calm, gentle person. Of course, just as often, her peacefulness came from being willfully oblivious. He often wondered if living like that wouldn't be a damn sight easier than being inside his head.  
  
He surveyed the kitchen and saw that, besides the portion on a plate in the refrigerator, she'd finished the pot roast and had washed the pan and all the dishes in the sink, the ones that had sat there for two days while James stubbornly refused to do them. Perhaps his uncle had fetched her some brandy. He hated himself for wondering it. He didn't open the cabinet to see.  
  
When his knuckles had knocked against the milk bottle a few moments before, they had come alive with a dull pain. Now, they felt stiff and hot, the joints as if on fire, the low-burning kind, like the first catch of a flame on a gas stove, maybe. It hadn't hurt that much the last time, when he came home after putting his fist through that man's face that obscenely sunny afternoon up on Mrs. Karzinski's roof, but that was because of the distraction of his knee. He'd fucked it up falling on a loose nail, tearing pants and flesh alike. Every so often, it still gave him a twinge.  
  
The crew boss was a friend of his, or else he wouldn’t have driven him to the emergency room and waited as he had a tetanus shot and had the wound irrigated. But as they sat there in the exam room, watching the blood and God knew what else bubble up out of his knee, he'd told him there was no way he would be able to keep him on, not after him going off on smiling Ted Baker—out of the blue, with no provocation.  
  
The crew boss was a good enough friend that when James had felt the fire light up inside him again—or maybe it had simply never gone out—he refrained from hitting him, too. He refrained from yelling or even saying through gritted teeth,  _It's been coming._  What did it matter to them that it had? That was the point.  
  
Comparing the two situations was what puzzled him the most about this business of the California hippie: he hadn't thought he wanted to hit him until he did it. Despite the way the man had run his mouth all night, James had had no desire to lay a hand on him. He'd only wanted to talk to him. Then they'd fallen in a heap of hard limbs and gasping breath, and it had just…happened. He simply had to get the man to back off, physically. Never mind that he'd spent the last couple of hours pulling him closer and closer. It was just that he hadn't at all been aware what was going on until he was suddenly fighting to breathe. If he'd known, he'd've never even followed him into the alley.   
  
Not to mention it wasn't really about that nameless feeling that made his skin flush and his head swim, was it? He had dealt with that before, and he could deal with it again; it was something temporary and stupid, and he could always put it out of his mind. No, it was surely about the man himself, an overly-earnest Yankee in a suit that stood on one of the streets of his own hometown and tried to tell him how backward he was. Yet although that should have earned him a punch in the face, James wouldn't for the world have given him one, not for that. Instead, he felt the urge to grab him and shake him until he opened his fucking eyes. There was so much Shephard thought he could change simply by the power of his will or his honesty or whatthehellever he called that demeanor of his. How was it that James had learned already—a younger man than Shephard—that things didn't change that easily?   
  
As James stood at the sink, rinsing his glass, he heard his mother come shuffling into the kitchen.  
  
"Hey there," she said with a lazy smile. "Didn't hear you come in."  
  
"Didn't wanna wake you up."  
  
She stood in the doorway, pulling her robe tighter around her, smoothing down her blonde hair. "It's a little chilly in here, isn't it?"  
  
"I hadn’t noticed."  
  
"It's probably the weather. I thought I heard rain."  
  
"Yeah. Started 'bout twenty minutes ago."  
  
She was sleepy, only half awake, but her gaze held him there at the sink, so he simply leaned back against the counter and waited.   
  
She said, "You were out late."  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"I thought you were going in early tomorrow."  
  
"The old man said I could come in if I wanted to. He's got some kind of, I don't know, project for me or something. Probably just wants me to clean out the supply shed. I can do that anytime."  
  
"Well, I can't have you sleeping all day tomorrow. I've got business, and I need you to drive me."  
  
"Business?"  
  
"I told Flora Tarkington that I'd come by and get her daughter's dress for the winter formal."  
  
"What? Flora Tarkington can surely manage to get that dress here when she's in town. I don't know why I should have to drive you all the way out to snob hill to pick it up."  
  
"What's gotten into you? Have you been drinking?"  
  
"Have you?" he said.  
  
She narrowed her eyes, and he held his breath, waiting to see what kind of night this would be.   
  
But she just said wearily, "I'm going up to bed, James. I left you some pot roast in the fridge."  
  
"I know," he replied, sighing that breath back out.   
  
She snorted. "You know?" She shook her head and shuffled toward the stairs; she could manage to make even walking an accusation.  
  
"Thanks, Momma."  
  
She stopped on the creaky bottom step and turned. "Nine o'clock."  
  
"Where else we got to go?"  
  
She leaned against the banister. "The Humphries's and the Williams's."  
  
"I thought Mrs. Williams had a maid who could do her sewing."  
  
"She did. Some little colored girl, sister of the last one. But Rita thinks she was stealing from them, so she let her go."  
  
James sighed. "What else?"  
  
"Well, you know how they are sometimes. The ones from out in Eastman, especially, and—"  
  
"No. I didn't mean all that. I meant, what other errands?"  
  
"I need to go uptown for some things. Hat. Shoes."  
  
"For that ridiculous reunion dance?"  
  
"It's not ridiculous. When your twenty year comes along, you'll want to go."  
  
"I doubt that."  
  
"Well, if you spent any time with anyone but Bud and Franklin, and that Shane, socializing like a normal young person, maybe you'd—"  
  
"Momma."  
  
"I'm sorry," she said with a huff, then she nodded crisply, as if to herself. "Your business is your business. Always has been. Even when you were a boy. I'd be surprised if I know anything at all about your life."  
  
"Momma…"  
  
"Of course, it would help if you could keep it under control. I wonder that you didn't inherit my sense of responsibility."  
  
She was pushing, just itching to bring up his father, so he cut her off at the pass. "When is the dance?"  
  
"Thursday week, but we have a meet and greet this Sunday afternoon to kick things off."  
  
"That's crazy. Who ever heard of a week-long reunion."  
  
"Well, so many of us are still in town…"  
  
He sighed again. "I don't even know why you need a reunion, then."  
  
"You're being so difficult tonight."  
  
"Ain't I always," he said. "Now, look, I can't drive you on Sunday. I've got—"  
  
"Yes, yes," she said with a wave of her hand. "I'm well aware of your busy schedule. Too busy for your own mother. Your uncle, too. Ralph Douglas is going to escort me."  
  
He didn't know what to be more annoyed and amused at: the idea of a woman her age being 'escorted' anywhere, like this was a fucking coming-out cotillion or something, or that it was Ralph fucking Douglas.   
  
She immediately picked up on his reaction. "I do not need another lecture from you on this subject, James."  
  
"No lecture, Momma. I'm damn tired of this  _subject_ , anyway."  
  
"Don't take such a tone with me. And your language! What's wrong with you tonight?"  
  
"Nothing. Just… Just go to bed."  
  
"I plan to," she snapped, but if she had any fight in her, it seemed to dissolve into sleepiness. She added, curtly but more quietly, "And you should be in bed shortly, too."  
  
"After I have some pot roast, okay?" he said cordially, already regretting the way he'd somehow managed to stir her up without even trying. Anyone else in the world, he could temper his mouth, but somehow no matter what he did, he couldn't avoid saying something that made his mother alternately disappointed, mortified, or flat out angry.   
  
"That's fine, dear. Nine o'clock." She pulled herself up the stairs by the banister as he went back into the kitchen. He had no doubt that by the time her head hit the pillow, she would've already shrugged off that discussion, and it would only be remembered if she was a damn sight more sober than he figured she was and only then if she needed some ammunition in the future.  _You always complain about driving me places_  or  _You've started swearing like a sailor, like some common trash_.  
  
His mother never swore. It was a sign of bad breeding, and if nothing else, she wasn't ill bred. To her, even slamming the back door so hard the glass popped out and shattered on the patio or throwing a drinking glass across the kitchen and into the hallway was permissible behavior—or at least not a sign of anything serious—as long as she didn't swear. Once upon a time, he would have gotten the belt for swearing, but that had been when his father was still in the house. His mother, for all her clinging to certain notions of propriety that quite frankly no longer applied, had no force to make him do anything anymore. At least not physical force.   
  
He quickly wolfed down the cold roast, but it settled heavy in his stomach. It surely wasn't the little alcohol he had, so it must've been that he was still rattled. When he left the house that morning, he'd had no idea that he'd end up meeting an honest-to-God liberal, much less one that he'd kill half the night talking to. Not that he'd been able to quite say what he wanted. He spent half his time as tour guide, trying to emphasize the good, and so much of the rest of the time he'd been countering the man's ignorant and just plain pig-headed remarks. He hadn't been able to say all the things he felt and believed. He was profoundly curious about how the man would respond to his ideas.  
  
His mother was right: he had few friends, really. He had a lot of people he'd call buddies, who he could go out drinking and shooting pool with, but he had very few people close enough to him that he'd open his mouth to say that kind of shit to, run over his confusions about the war and everything else happening in the world. For some reason, he'd thought that Shephard guy was someone he might be able to talk to. No, not thought--felt. Of course, it turned out the guy was just looking to confuse him and do whatever the fuck else it was he meant to do with his eyes looking at him like that and his hands holding him too tight and that wide-open vulnerable face of a person who doesn't know when to fucking quit or how to just leave well enough alone.   
  
If the guy had been like Shane, he might've been able to endure it. Shane was the sort of friend who was always around you, always willing to listen. Willing to talk, too, but it mostly took separating them from the rest of the group before he'd do it. Sitting out alone by the water at four in the morning or riding back from some party at midnight, the words would finally come up out of Shane, like they were pulled straight from his chest, but they floated easy, drifted toward James through the cool night air and almost physically curled around him until his own thoughts would settle, too. He'd never met anyone else he could talk to like that. He'd also never met anyone who could give him so much space even when they sat so close they were touching, boots colliding as their legs dangled off the edge of the pier or shoulders falling together when they set up the old tent down at the creek.   
  
He supposed he saw Shane differently than he did his other friends. He hadn't grown up with him. In fact, they hadn't met until James was fourteen. Shane stepped into his life like he was already grown up and settled. Of course, he wasn't. He did as many dumb ass things as the rest of them did, but he never seemed confused about himself. It was as if he understood himself pretty perfectly; he just didn't know how to make anyone else understand. So James spent a few long nights listening to Shane try to talk through it all, and somewhere along the way, he'd learned to pick himself apart, too.   
  
But that had been high school. Somehow in two years they'd drifted apart. Sure, they saw each other sometimes, even went out drinking from time to time, but they weren't kids anymore, waiting to grow up. James sometimes wished he could go back to that time when he had nothing in the world to worry about but himself—except maybe his mother, but even then, she was more stable, not drinking so much yet, determined to figure out how to survive being a divorced woman. It helped that James's father had been the one that left. It made it seem (to most of the community, at least) like it was his fault, not hers. Shane was the only person he ever told the whole story to, the problem that made this thing with that lousy son of a bitch Frank Douglas seem like nothing.  
  
Talking to Shephard had made him start to think about Shane not just because of the easy camaraderie but because of the way something kind of sparked up between them; at least, he'd often imagined he felt it with Shane, but he couldn't be sure. That seemed fitting, in a way—the thing itself as well as the uncertainty about it. When they came together, a lot of things he thought he was sure of started to come apart; he could let himself think in ways and about ideas he normally wouldn't. But that was okay, because when they split up again, which usually involved sobering up, too, he would knit himself and his ideas back together. Everything new rolled around loose until it eventually either fell into place or simply dropped out, not exactly something he could control, but nothing really forced on him, either.   
  
The reason he was so comfortable with Shane, at least at first, was in large part the low and reassuring tone of his voice. He could admit that much. But if there was anything else to it, they never talked about it, and James never wanted to know. He preferred to let that thing lie nameless and unspoken, because then it didn't seem dangerous. Shane wasn't dangerous. But he was starting to feel like Shephard was.   
  
The simple fact was Shephard had inspired him to be more hard-headed than he'd been in weeks. It was almost like he was being obstinate for its own sake, or simply because Shephard was. This thing was nearly senseless—because Shephard was senseless. The man protested the goddammed war. He thought the war was wrong, that the soldiers were wrong, that it would be better to halt everything and let all those boys suffer the consequences than carry on with this "injustice." He'd rather stick to his ideals—ones that were so fucked up James couldn't even begin to process it—than be practical. Of course Shephard could say such things. He wouldn't suffer the consequences. The soldiers would. And America would. But James thought that was crap. Maybe it wasn't a just war, but it was a war that had to be fought. Nobody liked it, but that didn't mean you could just wish it away.  
  
And then for the man to go bug-eyed and actually manhandle him when he called him on it? It didn't make sense. You'd've thought he insulted his grandmother or something, the way he reacted to hearing what his own bullshit really meant. James was curious, really curious to know what it was that made Shephard's brain such an all-fired jumble. War was bad, fighting was bad, but the soldiers were good? A person couldn't think that way, could he? And just why in the hell would he, anyway? James thought he deserved to know. He suddenly realized he needed to know.  
  
He hoped his mother was already asleep, so she wouldn't hear the car backing out of the driveway. And he hoped he wouldn't have to break any rich hippie faces to make Shephard come out of one of those drafty old houses to tell him why the fuck he'd decided he could come to James's town, pretend to want his company and care about his opinions, and then shove him around over something that didn't make sense.   
  
*****  
  
He was halfway to the address he recalled from the slip of paper when two things occurred to him. One was that Shephard might be high as a kite by now, less coherent than he was earlier, even with a little booze in his system. Surely less prone to retaliation, too, but also more likely to run off at the mouth even worse. The other was that James realized he was doing this more than partly because he simply needed to see his face. He needed to be standing in front of him again, because as confusing as he could be, James felt like he could at least start to make sense of him then. In the meantime, he felt his stomach begin to twist into knots, so he tried not to think about everything, instead watching the windshield wipers brush away the light but steady rain.  
  
When James pulled up to the curb at the address he'd recalled from earlier in the night, people were spread over the long front porch, watching the rain, smoking something that was probably not tobacco. From what he could see in the light from the weak porch bulb, Shephard wasn't among them. Though he hadn't expected him to be out there, the fact that he wasn't still managed to really bother him.  
  
He walked up the sidewalk slowly—it was already past midnight—and though none of them got up, they eyed him warily. When he turned up the walk, and it was clear he was coming toward the house, one of them called out to him.  
  
"Can I help you, buddy?" His tone wasn't as friendly as the words implied; disarmingly polite, on the surface, but read loud and clear as a serious question.  
  
"Looking for Jackson Shephard. I met him tonight. Told me he was staying here."   
  
Suddenly, the spokesman thrust out his hand and caught the knee of the girl beside him. "Go in and telephone the police. It's him. It's got to be him."  
  
"Now just hold on," James said, holding up his hands. The girl had stood, and now she leaned back against the house, waiting. "I come to talk. That's all."  
  
"He said you hit him in the face."  
  
"I did. He'll have a hell of a shiner tomorrow. I wanted to apologize for that."  
  
After a long pause, during which the spokesman didn't actually consider anything, just let James's words hang in the air, he said, "I don't think that's smart."   
  
When he finally stood, it was obvious he was a fraternity jock or might as well have been, and he was now stepping easily into the role of confident authority figure. Except his hand shook when he put out his cigarette. Apparently, despite his assumption of the role of protector, the situation or James scared him, maybe both. James would have laughed if his own heartbeat wasn't beginning a wild throb of its own.  
  
"Look, things got out of hand, but I'd just like to explain to him that I don't usually act like that."  
  
The spokesman smirked in a way that made James's blood start to boil, but he kept his place just outside the circle of the dim porch light. Anyway, he was saved by the movement of another girl, farther down the porch, who stood up and leaned against a concrete support, her hand trailing out into the night, flicking the ashes off a cigarette.  
  
She said—not to James but to the spokesman—"Maybe he'll tell us just what it is they were fighting about."  
  
"What does it matter, Margene?"  
  
"Matters to him, I reckon." She blew smoke to the sky. It looked like she might've been smiling, but it was dark and James couldn't tell. But if she was who he thought she was—could it be Margene Simpson, who used to sit beside him in the seventh grade at the city school, sitting on that porch with these college snobs?—he was probably right.  
  
James said, "He didn't say anything about…?"  
  
"No," the spokesman said. Now, he moved down onto the steps. "Now, look, man. Whatever you said has already been said, and there's no sense making it worse by coming around here."  
  
James held his breath, forcing down the frustration. Then he replied, "I'd like to hear that from him."  
  
"I can tell you right now, that's not going to happen."  
  
The spokesman glanced back at the girl by the door, and James instantly felt something shift, like this was about to get a lot less polite.   
  
So James said, "There's no need to call the law. I'm leaving. But I'm gonna come by again in the morning, and you better let him come to the door and speak to me, because I'd like him to leave town with a better impression of it than he has now."  
  
He fixed the spokesman in his gaze, trying to keep a balance of controlled and contrite. He hoped Shephard was somewhere at a window watching, but he didn't dare look up to see.   
  
As he turned around and walked back to his car, feeling every pair of eyes on him, noticing the way the rain had subsided into a fine mist, he heard a male voice say, "Jesus, Stewart. Maybe he's sorry."  
  
"Yeah," another voice chimed in. "Maybe he's like you are when you've had a few." A chorus of laughter filled the yard for a moment. James felt distinctly pushed—out of their presence, back into the night. Where he belonged.  
  
Then the voice of that smoking girl they'd called Margene said a little too loudly, "Not that all this macho bullshit matters anyway. He's not even here."  
  
James wanted to let himself turn around to acknowledge that passing of information, but he didn't. Instead, he simply climbed back into his car and drove out toward the highway, the impatience resurging alongside an even greater apprehension. He wasn't sure he had the guts to pursue this—standing in that yard had made him see how crazy it was—but he was more sure than ever that he needed to. Until he'd stood there in that yard, he hadn't known that he really was regretful, in a way he never had been and never would be about punching smiling Ted Baker.  
  
*****  
  
Every stoplight he came to was red. They cast an eerie glow on the wet pavement as he waited, fingers clutched to the steering wheel, then came the cool, ethereal green light, and his car crept forward. He felt sober. Not that he hadn't been mostly sober before, but now everything felt too real—chilled and damp, like the night air; and dark. Everything was so dark in this town, except for the other cars occasionally passing his, filled with other people whose problems he always knew he couldn't fathom, but now he felt it keenly. They couldn't fathom his, so why should he have a clue about theirs?  
  
He wondered who drove Shephard out to his hotel, if that was indeed where he was. He tried to imagine what Shephard saw as he crossed town like this, late at night, confused, probably his head throbbing, his eye smarting. He wondered how the town looked to this man who was from as far away as James could imagine. It was funny, but he hadn't quite thought about how to see the campus through Shephard's eyes, even when he was playing tour guide. Now that he considered it, he began to wonder what Shephard must've been seeing, especially in him.  
  
He'd proved himself to be a redneck, hadn't he? Punching somebody in the goddamned face over politics. And he didn't even know what the hell they had really been fighting over. He didn't like to think about what Jack had seen when he looked at him then, not about this business of the war and definitely not about whatever it was that apparently lay behind it all, crouched and waiting. It was sprung upon him. How else was he supposed to react to suddenly looking into the man's eyes and seeing a whole world of shit that hadn't been there before? Or maybe it had been and he hadn’t seen it. That's what really pissed him off. If he'd never known, that would have been fine. Ignorance is bliss and all of that. Let him have all the fucked-up feelings he wants. James wanted no part of them.   
  
Yet here he was, driving out to the man's hotel room.  
  
"Jesus Christ," he muttered to himself.   
  
James couldn't imagine the way Shephard saw this town because he didn't live the kind of life the man did. It wasn't like he didn't know the rest of the world existed. He watched classmates get shipped off the Vietnam or float away from home to some college world they rarely returned from. He'd never thought about leaving while he was growing up, even after his father left. He got postcards and packages bearing a stamp from a post office in South Carolina, but even the idea of going there, to see this man that seemed more and more like a character on an old TV show than a real person—much less his own father—was foreign to him. Or it always had been. Then came the day that one of those things that kept this town from being foreign to him, even at its worst, had up and gone away, for good.  
  
Glinda's daughter 'Sephonie was about the smartest girl he'd ever met, but the best thing about her was she didn't care about going around and proving it all the time. It was just something you knew about her, so that when she narrowed those big, dark eyes at you, you didn't have to know exactly what she was thinking to know she was calculating and you would lose. But she didn't care a thing about winning, either, just so that you knew she had you if she wanted you.   
  
Where her mother was sharp, 'Seph was easy and soft, that warm laugh with a way of making you believe everything was okay, even when it wasn't. He supposed that was why it was so surprising when she hopped in a pickup truck with her cousin Barlow at the end of last summer and went to Memphis and never came back. He hadn't quite believed a person could just do that. He hadn't even known why they would, but he quickly decided it meant she was unhappy. It was just that he'd never thought of her as being unhappy; he definitely hadn't thought he could be so oblivious.   
  
When he looked back, though, he saw the signs. He recalled dozens of conversations where her eye was always on the door or the ceiling—anywhere but the smoky walls of the bar. She'd been kind of dreamy since the day he met her when she was just a kid too, hanging around the bar with her mother while he was doing odd jobs and running errands for Tommy's old man. After they got older, as they world had begun to change, even in this town in Alabama, she used to pull him outside by the hand and bum cigarettes off him, as though her mother wouldn't have both their hides if she caught them. She'd always looked on him like a friend, despite the color of his skin, because he'd always treated her like she could be, no despiting necessary. So she told him stories, but they were not about the things that drove her out; they were about the things that lured her away. Not about being harassed by those fat-ass cops downtown who thought this was Birmingham or Selma but about how there was a beauty college upstate that her aunt said would let her pay on installments.   
  
He'd come in to the bar one night to find Glinda slinging glasses around in the dishwater so hard it made a splash and a clunk that echoed through the whole place. She wouldn't speak, but when 'Seph came through the room, and Glinda raised her finger, her mouth opening, James found himself drifting to 'Seph's side like he always did. The girl didn't bother to stay out of fights with her mother, but James couldn't help coming to her defense. He could charm Glinda when he wanted to, or when Glinda was in the mood to be charmed. That night, however, there was no charming Glinda out of this one, and, really, he didn't want to; he shared her frustration and her anger, even if he didn't have a mother's luxury of showing it.   
  
Glinda had finally snapped at her: "I don't know what you think you're gonna do with your life, Persephonie Adelle, but roaming all over God's green earth ain't the way to accomplish it. What do you s'pose'll happen out there that can't happen here?"  
  
"I don't know, Momma," she'd replied. "But it's gonna happen."  
  
Her eyes had swung to James, as if he would understand, but he didn't, not then. It sounded like nonsense to him. He understood a little better now, at least the certainty that moving couldn't be any worse than staying in one place. But he still didn't see how it would be any better, either. What did it mean for Shephard that he got to see the whole fucking country? Suppose you saw it all? What was a person supposed to do with all that seeing? How did you know what to ground yourself to? Did moving mean coming up with dumb ass notions like Shephard's, dropping problems like you dropped out of your life whenever it suited you?  
  
He was stopped at the long light at the junction with 161 when he had the sudden thought that he was mad at 'Sephonie. Of course he was and probably always had been, even if he hadn't let himself dwell on it. She was this constant in his life, and she'd dropped off the face of the planet, at least as far as he was concerned. What was he supposed to do with not seeing her face light into one of those easy smiles again? It was never the useless people who left. It was always somebody like a piece of your soul (even if you didn't quite know it) who slipped away in the night and didn't leave you any room for remembering them without it hurting.  
  
The only recourse you had was to stop remembering or stop letting that part of your soul be squeezed in anybody's hands, much less those like hers, small and sure. When he felt any pity for his mother, that was it. Did she miss his father? He knew she did. Didn't matter that she'd brought it on herself, with years of subtle attack, weeks of duplicity, days of anger and blame. It had to have hurt her. James wondered if it hurt his father, too. Tonight, putting his foot to the gas pedal again, he fucking hoped it did.   
  
Of course, that was easy to say in hindsight. He didn't know what he'd do if his wife had decided his home and his love wasn't good enough and ran off to some other man. James had never heard the name; his parents had never used it in front of him, even as they shouted so many more hurtful words across the house in that altercation that had left its mark on its very structure, the groove in the wood floor in the hallway, the scuff mark on the paneling in the den. Marks on the house rather than marks on anyone's skin, but it didn't seem to matter that the thing had burned hot for an hour or so and gone out, controlled down to a cool blue flame again. James had begun to realize only too late how long that flame had probably been burning, for the both of them but mostly his father. He had to admire the man for keeping his hands off her, for getting in the truck and never really coming back.   
  
Except that one time, a week later, which is the way James liked to remember him. His daddy had sat him down and explained, in the way an adult could to a twelve-year-old boy, that he should stay with his momma, watch over her. He didn't say anything stupid like James was the man of the house; he'd discovered that on his own. He'd also discovered, in the intervening years, exactly what that meant. He loved his mother—sure—but he hadn't married her. Still, he was stuck with her. As much as he admired his father for saying it all to his face that day—that it was his own fault, that he simply didn't know how to go on this way, that it would be better for everyone for him to go, that he was so sorry—James had never quite been able to add up that man and the patient man he remembered in his house to a shoebox full of postcards and birthday cards. Or maybe it added up perfectly: to his inability to cope, to endure, to even try and fix things.   
  
James sometimes believed his father could have, even if it defied logic. At least he should have tried. So he blamed him for the things that didn't get fixed and for the other things that got broke.  
  
James wondered what his father gained from his shiny new life in South Carolina. Maybe it wasn't even shiny. The world was fucked up no matter where you were. That's what Shane often said, but he said it with a smile, like it was a puzzle to solve and not a thing to weigh you down. James wished he could see the world like that, too—that was probably what drew him to Shane—but in the end it just wasn't possible. Life was not hypothetical, and it didn't ask you what you wanted out of it. You just got it and dealt with it.  
  
Life was his mother doing piecemeal sewing for women who used to think of her as an equal, if not in money at least in something intangible. It was those women smiling like that kid on the porch had smiled at him. Even worse, it was the guileless smiles of men on the roof of a house, laying shingles, talking about  _nigger women_  and  _the way they felt_  and  _the things they'd do_ —they'd  _all_  do—under the right circumstances.   
  
Life was Ted's face, this man who drank beer tapped by Glinda's own hand, as he simply smiled and mentioned Persephonie's name—familiarly, like he knew her, when he had no fucking clue the kind of shit she dealt with, especially the burden of ignorant smiles like his.  
  
That kind of casual talk normally made James sick to his stomach, but he could deal with it. It was just par for the course. Mindsets were complicated, put together in hard-to-untangle ways, and sometimes you had to overlook things. But that day, with 'Seph tucked away in Memphis and Glinda never, ever getting out of this town, it made him irrational. No, he thought, it made him too rational to put up with it anymore.  
  
Life was that closed fist but it was also James never going up on another roof to lay shingles again.   
  
But he was still pulling into the hotel parking lot, scanning it for a Chevelle until he remembered, with a laugh, that Shephard hadn't driven his car to Alabama.   
  
He had no way to find him and less chance of his presence being desired if he did. He knew he should go home, but tonight he was finally prepared to do something the hard way.   
  
At least, he thought, the rain had stopped.  
  
*****  
  
The clerk at the desk, half asleep with the radio on, was a guy who'd been a couple of years ahead of him in school. He couldn't for the life of him remember his name, but they guy knew his face, so he flipped through the book, told him where to go to find Shephard.  
  
Room 815 was near the end of the hall, beside a long window, open to the night air. He knew it was open, because smoke was drifting out of it from Shephard's mouth and from the cigarette in his hand. He sat in what looked like a hardback chair from his room, his legs stretched out parallel to the window. As he looked up and saw James in the hallway, he visibly stiffened, but he turned slowly so as not to seem either apathetic or scared but some cautious state in between. James could appreciate that.   
  
Like James had earlier, approaching the house, he walked carefully, with his head tilted down. Shephard let him get within a few feet before he held out his hand to motion for him to stop.   
  
The man was definitely a Yankee—no niceties, just an accusatory face, albeit a weary one. He supposed he deserved it. After all, what had James called him upon knowing him for all of thirty seconds? A fucking moron. That seemed like days ago.  
  
"What in God's name are you doing here?" Shephard said.  
  
"Wanted to talk."  
  
His face screwed up into a bitter smile, then he laughed to himself. "You're fucking crazy, you know."  
  
"Are you drunk?"  
  
"What do you care? No, wait, better question: how did you find me?"  
  
"Guessed."  
  
Shephard's eyes narrowed. "I don't know what you'd possibly have to say to me. Unless you came to make them match."   
  
He gestured resignedly toward his left eye, which was indeed a little swollen, red. Shephard would be explaining that black eye for days, how he'd gone to Dixie and gotten punched out by someone who still probably called the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression. James would become an amusing story. God, how he fucking hated that. Not as much, though, as he hated that Shephard would have to be embarrassed in telling it.  
  
"I wanted to apologize."  
  
Shephard snorted. "Well, I shoved you. Don't you think I should apologize, too?"  
  
"That's up to you. It's not what I came for. I don't care what kind of crazy opinions you have."  
  
Shephard laughed. "Like hell."  
  
"Yeah, like hell. I came to know why."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"Why did you shove me?"  
  
"I thought you came to apologize."   
  
"You're gonna make this damn difficult, aren't you?"  
  
A smile ghosted over his face before he spat out, "Well, excuse me if I'm still a little confused and if I don't quite trust you to be… Fuck, I don't even know." His hand flew up in the air and flopped back down. "Reasonable?"  
  
"I really am sorry I slugged you like that. I don't usually… I haven't hit anybody in… Well, the last time it was deserved. This time, it wasn't."  
  
"The last time?"  
  
"Caught between a rock and a hard place."  
  
"Oh?"  
  
James shuffled his feet, feeling those eyes of Shephard's digging into his skin, sweeping up over his frame but also trying to probe deep.   
  
James said, "Let's just say you might've done the same thing, if you were in my shoes. My kneejerk reactions aren’t always wrong."  
  
"But tonight…?"  
  
"Don’t know. I mean, I do. Shouldn't have. Mainly because it wouldn't help a damn thing. You're the kind of fool who's going to stay a fool; and if people always deserved to get hit in the face for being stupid, I reckon I'd be laid up somewhere with no teeth by now."  
  
Shephard's face contorted, going between a frown and a smile so rapidly James couldn't make sense of it. The smile seemed to win, but then the scowl came out swiftly, and Shephard stood up, ashing his cigarette out the window. He took a last drag before he tossed it.  
  
"You're not going anywhere, are you?" Shephard said.  
  
"Nope."  
  
"And if you stay, you're just going to keep on calling me a moron?"  
  
"Jack, I—"  
  
Shephard waved his hand and stood there for a moment, head down, his hand scratching at his scalp. When he looked up again, there was some kind of fire in his eyes. His voice was tense and high as he said, "You think I'm so ignorant, do you? You don’t know the first thing about me. If you did, you'd have never said what you said before."  
  
"Explain it to me."  
  
"Whatever."  
  
"I'm serious. Explain it to me. I wouldn't be here if I didn't want to know."  
  
Shephard stepped up to him, suddenly in his personal space in a way that put him on edge. He smelled just like he had before, only now he smelled like cigarettes, too. And whiskey.  
  
Shephard said, "You wanna know why I can be this big goddamned war protester but yet I don't like somebody telling me I don’t care about our soldiers? I do care. But I'm not going to stand out here in the fucking hallway in the middle of the night and wake people up just so you can judge me."  
  
James said, "I can't promise not to judge you. Anybody who pretends not to have opinions about what they hear's crazy or lying. But I ain't gonna interrupt you and I ain't gonna lay a hand on you again."  
  
"So you say."  
  
"Yeah. You know that, or you wouldn't still be out here. Now, as far as the hallway's concerned, I've got a car. We can go wherever you want."  
  
Shephard's eyes had been flitting all over, but they finally came to rest staring into his own, and James didn't look away. That was the most godawful uncomfortable thing he could imagine, especially since his gaze was drawn to the broken blood vessels underneath Shephard's eye.   
  
And then there was the heat radiating off of the man in waves. The inches made almost a physical pull. Then he felt this strange, warm feeling wash over him, real and sure, that if he could just lay his palm over the man's heart, he might know, he might understand. A flush came over his face. He was absolutely fucked. Absolutely. He couldn't walk away now if he wanted to, even if making any sense of any of it was going to be difficult and painful. He saw that now, how the knowing might be more than he really wanted. But he needed it all the same.  
  
Shephard's eyes softened, just for a moment, before his gaze fell away just as suddenly and surely as his shoulders dropped. He spun on his heels, around James and down the hall.  
  
"The parking lot will do," he said, padding toward the door to the stairs. When he got there, he stopped. James was still by the window. "Well, come on. Rain's gone, isn't it?"  
  
"Think so."  
  
"Good." He nodded as if to himself. "Good."  
  
"You're gonna tell me what it all means?"  
  
"I'm not even sure we speak the same language. But I'll try."  
  
James was about to move toward him when Shephard sighed and began to come back down the hallway toward him. "Let me get the bottle," he said.  
  
"Okay."  
  
"I'll need it. Because when I come back out here, I'm gonna tell you what you think you need to hear. I'm gonna tell you about Marc."  
  
James waited for him to duck back into the room, and he felt suddenly shaky. There was some sort of confirmation in even hearing the man's name. A man's name.   
  
The click of the door just a moment later, as Shephard passed back out, made him jump.   
  
Shephard handed him the bottle as he lit up another cigarette, his own hands shaking. Then he said, "The short story is Marc is probably my best friend in the world, and I haven't spoken to him in months. And it has everything to do with politics."  
  
"Sorry to hear that."  
  
"No." Shephard shook his head. "It's not something..." He paused, his face going blank.   
  
Then he said: "He's in Vietnam, and the last time I heard from him was before he got shot. I'm not even sure if he's still alive."  
  
As James stood there, frozen, Jack strode on ahead of him and pushed open the stairwell door. "Come on if you're coming," he said without looking back.  
  
Shell-shocked, James forced his hands to fumble for a cigarette; he lit it up and took a much-needed drag as he followed along behind him.


	4. Chapter 4

_"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,  
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.  
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,  
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."_

  
_\--_ "All Along the Watchtower," Bob Dylan

  
  
  
  
As Jack Shephard spread out an old newspaper on the wet stone picnic table and perched himself upon it, he was tempted to start babbling about the irony of the situation. He'd almost run out of cigarettes (which was just as well; too many made him jittery), but he still had that bottle of whiskey in his hands. Every step down those stairs had swayed him, but he was still walking and talking as though he wasn't at least two sheets to the wind. If he was, his voice seemed to say, it was accidental. Never mind that James knew exactly why he was drinking; still, he held his head up and set the bottle down gingerly, the clink and scrape of it reminding his ears too much of evenings on the terrace with his father.   
  
He hated to admit that he'd actually had several illuminating conversations with the man while he drank away some sorrow in his life, some inadequacy, some way he was living that wasn't what he'd wanted it to be. Not that he ever said such things. Mostly, when they spoke at length, his father had couched all his frustrations with himself as accusations about Jack's life. But Jack could understand those tangled, pitying feelings—even the need to talk without really speaking—intimately now. For him the  _wasn't what he wanted it to be_  was  _becoming a functional alcoholic_. Yet here he was.   
  
He had the fleeting thought that perhaps his father had been just like this once. Or maybe not just like this. He never needed rebellion; he was simply his own man, for all the good or ill it brought. If he ever spent long nights wrestling with ideas about himself and the world, Jack was sure he never would've done it under the gaze of a stranger whose voice and body could make his mouth go dry. James was standing under the tree a few feet from the table, nudging his feet against its roots, not even looking at him, but he was still too damn close.  
  
Jack had been quiet too long, he knew. He'd passed the initial burst of obstinate energy that led to the need to justify himself, and now he found that he wasn't all that anxious to break back into that silence. He had no idea what he'd say, only that it would be too much. The air was so damp it should have chilled him, but he felt warm and fuzzy for the second time that night. Things would have been easier if they were walking, he decided. This staying still made him nervous. The fluorescents on the outside of the building were a diffuse glow down under the trees, but they still caught the amber liquid in the bottle. It was oddly comforting, and that made Jack almost irrationally angry. Still, he didn't look up until James said:  
  
"So. Marc?"  
  
"You really want to know?"  
  
"Give me a break. You can't lay something out there like that and expect I won't be curious. And you obviously want to talk about it."  
  
"Obviously?"  
  
"Isn't that what you do—talk about it? Everywhere you go?"  
  
Jack smiled bitterly. "That's the hell of it. I forget all the time now. I don't know why I think I'm doing this—sometimes I don't think at all, really—but I certainly don't let myself think about…him."  
  
James nodded. "Probably saner, y'think?"  
  
"I know," he said, taking the bottle in his hands and just cradling it there. He'd wanted a drink, and that's precisely why he didn't take one.  
  
James stepped forward and held out his hand for the bottle. It startled Jack, his body so close again, but he pressed the bottle into his hands and watched him take a quick drink. He stepped back into place without handing him the bottle back, and Jack was absurdly grateful.  
  
James said, "How long have you known Marc?"  
  
"Years. He's the kind of friend you call to come get you when your car breaks down, and you don't even think to feel guilty. You don't even really thank him, because you'd do the same for him. It's just sort of a given."  
  
James was looking not at him but over his shoulder. He said, "I got a couple friends like that. Tell 'em anything, do anything for them. Ain't none of them over there, though."  
  
_Over there_.   
  
Being around James and talking to him about it—really talking, not just watching people nod, hearing them vaguely and unthinkingly cheer on his anti-war ideas, or worse, write them off just as unthinkingly—had awakened a lot of things in him. He hadn't been forced to really think about what he was doing or why in a long time. He realized that for all his talk of war and peace, he was rarely talking about why it mattered to him, and at this point he could come no nearer to actually being able to articulate it than he could that day Marc's unit had shipped out.   
  
Jack said, "I didn't try hard enough. To make him stay. I thought… I don't know. I guess I thought I didn't want him to leave mad."   
  
Jack felt a little like he wasn't really talking to James anymore, just thinking out loud. He floated there alone, feeling nothing but the intermittent gust of the wind ruffling his hair and the cold stone under his ass.   
  
He continued, "We had these talks all the time, and he knew how I felt, but I always stopped short of telling him he was crazy. You don't want your best friend in the world to be the blindest idiot, but, yet, there it is. I didn't do what I could've done."  
  
"You really think people who believe in protecting our country from communism are idiots?"  
  
Jack shook his head, and he couldn't keep a bitter smile from squinting up his face. "No. Not at all. It wasn't him. I was the one always preaching the greatest country in the world bullshit. It stops being bullshit about the time somebody enlists because they think being in Vietnam is the logical extension of every liberal scheme they ever had. Right on par with civil rights and women's lib. He thinks he can fix everything." He took a deep breath. "I think he got that attitude from me."  
  
"So you were a…?"  
  
"Were? No. I still am, I think. Deep down in here"—he pointed to his chest—"I know what has to be done. All the things you said to me, I know it. Worse, I feel it. When you open your eyes and see the big picture, you know people have to die. The world's so screwed up, and we need to do our best to patch it back it together. But when you start looking at who's dying, you change your mind. It's too great a sacrifice, especially for something that just doesn't fucking work anymore."  
  
"Why do you say Marc was crazy, then?"  
  
"I'm not sure he's over there because he wants to wipe out the communist government. I think he's just trying to make things better for the people."  
  
"Isn't that what we're doing?"  
  
"War is never a humanitarian effort. But in the end, it doesn't matter why we say we're doing it. It's a mess. It's unfixable."  
  
"Would you say that if Marc wasn't over there?"  
  
"No. And that's what makes me sick."  
  
"Guilt?"  
  
Jack opened his mouth to speak, but then he closed it again. Surely there was some way he could stop spilling his guts like this, but it seemed like some part of him wanted the words to keep flowing. "You know, we used to have these long talks. We'd have the world all worked out, in theory. We're both pretty optimistic people. We disagreed about causes, methods, but we generally thought we could change things."  
  
"That doesn't seem so bad."  
  
James was placating him. If he was in the same position as the man, he'd probably be doing the same thing, but it wasn't actually helping. If anything, it made him feel worse.  
  
Jack continued, "You sit around on your fucking patio, your very safe little patio, and you think you understand everything. Then he comes to my house one day and stands on that same patio we've talked on hundreds of times and tells me he thinks he's supposed to be over there, that he can see better and do more there. And I didn't tell him sit down, stay. I didn't say, it's real and it's messy and getting gunned down in a rice field isn't going to change anything. No amount of any of it means anything other than people dead and other people still sitting on their patios—or on their fucking picnic tables—talking."  
  
"But you don't believe that shit."  
  
"Don't I?"  
  
Jack watched his face shift from cautious pacification to the same sort of honesty he'd given him all night. It was a relief.   
  
James said, "If you really thought things were hopeless, you wouldn't keep talking about your friend in the present tense. And you wouldn't march your crazy California ass into a lecture hall in Alabama where I know good and well half the people weren't paying you any mind and most of the other half thought you were crazy."  
  
"You included."  
  
"Yeah. Well," he said with a wave of his hand, as if still caught up in the argument and anxious to get back to it. But Jack felt an absurd smile ghost over his face, and when he looked up at James, he found a smile curling his lips, too. "Ain't made up my mind yet."  
  
But that moment of camaraderie, as nice as it felt, was quickly gone. Jack said wearily, "It's almost like I don't care if they agree with me."  
  
"Who the fuck are you kidding? Why'd you invite me into the alley with you? You wanted to change my mind. You wanted to talk."  
  
"It's all I'm good for. But you can't have forgotten that I was talking about ending the war."  
  
He snorted. "What I heard outside those big wooden doors was somebody being about fifty kinds of vague about any kind of question of how. That, by the way, was why I called you a fucking moron. Yeah, end it. Get them home. Do something. But do what? And where does it end? You don't want them to pull out. Do you really wanna look me in the face right now and tell me you'd be perfectly fine with our soldiers just magically disappearing tomorrow, and just leave things the way they are, fuck the Vietnamese if they got a problem with it?"  
  
"Why not?" Jack snapped.  
  
"You don't believe that! You're still hoping enough good intentions here, enough people giving a shit and paying attention, will somehow bring people around to some idea they never had before, find a way to fix things."  
  
James was looking expectantly at him. Jack realized, then, that they might've stood there until the sun came up talking in circles around the war, and they wouldn't get anywhere he himself hadn't already been a hundred times before. He often wondered why he was still out on the lecture circuit, talking to students about thinking for themselves and joining the protest. What in the hell could all the thinking and talk in the world accomplish? For all the rare times he swept onto a campus and lit a fire under an apathetic student body, there were trips that put out any fire he had in him, and there were nights like this the made him wonder if he wasn't just setting up more and more people for frustration and disappointment.   
  
If nothing else, he thought cynically, maybe I'm keeping them out of the fucking army.   
  
James added, a moment later, "I think it's good, what you're doing. Crazy, but worth respecting."  
  
"What is this?" Jack said, suddenly lurching off the table and snatching the bottle from James's hand. "If I wanted a psychiatrist, I'd be talking about my rotten childhood on somebody's couch for fifty dollars an hour. Yeah, so I want a way to end it without things collapsing into world war three. But we're not even trying to do that. That's ostensibly why I'm here.  _Wake up. The war is a failure. We can't do what we set out to do._  In the mean time, we're still selling it to people like there's the possibility of progress. And more Marcs out there believe it every day."  
  
"Now,  _that_  I don't believe. I think it's just the opposite, actually. But, anyway, don't you think… Well, isn't it maybe possible that your friend isn't as dumb as you think he is? You think he was a blind optimist? Maybe that's the face he wore—for you—but if he's half as smart as you act like he is, he didn't go over there thinking everything would be easy. I'd guess he just felt like he had to do it, even if it didn't work."  
  
"It doesn't matter."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"It only matters that he's there and he's probably dead and all the things I thought I understood about patriotism were complete bullshit."  
  
James didn't reply to that. He didn't even gravely nod the way his parents did when he expressed his confusion and sadness. Of course, they'd also been spewing so much of his own garbage at him—duty, honor, country—that he had long ago learned to shut them out. They'd come to know that any conversation about politics with Jack would devolve into shouting, and since they weren't keen on such loud, emotional displays, they no longer bothered to start any. Sometimes Jack was glad for that. Sometimes, though, he practically ached to have a verbal battle with his father, to vent his spleen a little and do something other than smile at student government presidents and firmly shake their hands. He felt firm, yes, but only in ignoring the things that might make him unstable. He felt so firm he'd come to Alabama without a notion in his head that anything could shake him up.  
  
Of course, he was mostly sure it wasn't Alabama at all but James Ford.  
  
James was looking at him without an ounce of pity but not unkindly. Actually, he seemed to be a little lost in his own head. Jack took a slug of whiskey and let the bottle scrape-clink against the stone again.  
  
Then James said, quietly, "They're not bullshit. It's just harder than you ever thought it was."  
  
Jack felt a squeezing in his chest. There had been too many words, and his head was swimming. Five minutes with this man was enough, now, to make him half-panicky. He couldn't imagine how they'd sat together, played pool, walked and talked so contentedly all evening. Just having his eyes on him now was too much.  
  
Jack said, "It's not all about politics. It's about my friend being gone."  
  
"You miss him."  
  
"Yeah," Jack sighed. He stood up, his voice louder now. "Okay, so now you have your answer. Will you leave me in peace?"  
  
It was pointedly rude, he knew, but he picked up the bottle and began to meander back up the incline, toward the lobby doors, without so much as shaking the man's hand and saying goodbye. It didn't seem like a conversation to close, just one to suspend, even if Jack knew he would never see him again. The things he'd stirred up would be with him anyway.   
  
He was halfway to the building, just crossing over into the full lamp-light, when James said, "Does he know you're in love with him?"  
  
Jack froze, and he very nearly dropped the bottle. Only a lifetime of standing with his back to his father, enduring criticism and biting his tongue, kept him still and held together. Or maybe it was the alcohol. Through the fuzziness and warmth in his limbs, a shakiness began to spread that eventually found its source in the frantic beating of his heart. Adrenaline, waiting for footsteps. But James didn't move, and Jack turned around, unable to help himself.  
  
James looked nervous. That helped tremendously. Curious and nervous. Not disgusted. But there was some sympathy there, rounding off the features of his face and making him look almost like someone Jack could confide in, should he want to. He didn't, surely.   
  
Jack turned back and continued his ascent up the hill, his heartbeat still thudding dully in his ears. After a moment, he heard footsteps following him. As much as he wanted to break into a run, another instinct was telling him to stop being foolish, just be an adult and keep walking. So he crossed through the lobby silently, finding the clerk sound asleep, and when he began to pull himself up the stairs, one shaking hand clinging to the hand rail, he heard a heavier footfall come behind him.  
  
When he got back to his room, he didn't bother to pull the door entirely shut. It didn't seem to matter anymore. Whatever James wanted to do, he would do it. Apparently, Jack would let him.  
  
James knocked on the door even as he pushed it open. He shut it firmly but quietly behind him.  
  
"What?" Jack said.   
  
"You  _are_  queer?"   
  
Jack took a deep breath and held it.  
  
James added, "I ain't gonna hit you again if you say you are."  
  
Jack huffed out the breath, unable to stop himself from laughing disdainfully. "Oh, so  _that's_  what that was about."  
  
"No," James replied, and he looked a little flustered, but only for a moment before he clamped down on it again. "I'm just saying, you're looking at me like I'm liable to take a swing at you if you admit you're a faggot. I'm just telling you, I won't."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"Well, are you?"  
  
Jack shook his head. "I don't know."  
  
"How do you not know?"  
  
Jack smirked to himself and lay back against the bed. "How does anybody? How do  _you_?"  
  
The rush of adrenaline was still there, and it ramped up again as he thought about how dangerous this was. Despite James's most recent displays of restraint, Jack had no faith that the man could keep control of his emotions. Maybe Jack simply didn't care if he did. But as he lay there, reconsidering being an absolute smart-ass, cursing the way alcohol sometimes made him tactless and talky and stupid, he minded very much if James decided he wasn't in the mood to be poked and prodded about something as complicated as his masculinity. Because that's surely the way he'd see it. After all, didn't Jack?  
  
He didn't look at James, but he heard him sit down on the chair that Jack had earlier pulled out into the hallway, which was now beside the door.   
  
James said, "That's what this is, right? You're…in love with him, and you're worried about him."  
  
"No."  
  
"Okay, whatever," he said sarcastically. "My mistake. You're straight as a fucking arrow."  
  
"I mean, no I'm not in love with him."  
  
"But you are…?"  
  
"Like I said, I don't know. Probably. But I don't think about Marc that way. I never have."  
  
"No?"  
  
"What possible reason would I have to lie to you about it? I've already admitted this much, haven't I? You'll just have to believe me when I say Marc is my best friend in the world and I trust him with my life, but I don't want to…sleep with him. In fact, I'd say that's half of why it took me so long to sort out my head—if it is, in fact, sorted."  
  
"You ever slept with a man?"  
  
He murmured, "Jesus Christ…"  
  
"Have you?"  
  
"What the fuck do you care?"  
  
James exhaled loudly. "I don't. I don't, okay. I'm just trying to make sense of you, is all. Does Marc know about you?"  
  
Jack wasn't sure why he kept answering these questions. He didn't owe this man anything, and this wasn't anything he really wanted to talk about, was it? But he continued: "Have I told him? No. But I think he knows. That's what kind of friend he is. He doesn't make me feel weird about it or ask me twenty questions or—"  
  
"Hey, I'm not trying to make you feel weird, Jack, I—"  
  
"No," Jack said. For a moment, he didn't know what to say, only that he needed James to stop. "I just meant that's why I miss him. I think he must've known, but he didn't freak out about it. He just…accepted it. And not just because his ideals or whatever tell him to. He's a good friend."  
  
Jack risked a peek at James's face, but he was shut up inside his head again. So Jack closed his eyes and listened to the sound of rain starting up again, just a shower from the sound of the drops tapping against that window that wouldn't open. He kind of wished it did so he could get some air. But if he lay very still, it wasn't at all like this thing could suffocate him. He would lay still and breathe evenly and wait to see what James would say.  
  
Jack was still lying there with his eyes closed when James began speaking again.  
  
"I have this friend," he said. "I haven't ever been sure if he is or not. Didn't used to bother me, but now it makes me kinda nervous to be around him. I think that's why I mostly avoid him now."  
  
"Then why are you here?"  
  
"Didn't say why it made me nervous, now, did I?"  
  
Jack's eyes snapped open and he had to resist the urge to roll over and unabashedly stare at the man.   
  
He thought James was going to play it cool, maybe ask him another question about Marc to deflect things.   
  
Instead, James said, "Just so I know, I'm not crazy, am I? You wanted to…kiss me, or something. Before."  
  
"I wouldn't."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
Jack sat up. "Do I look stupid to you? I'm perfectly well aware of where I am. And who says I go around kissing people I don't know."  
  
"Especially men."  
  
"Yeah, especially. It's stupid."  
  
"You're scared."  
  
"Oh, for God's sake! Don’t sit over there and make…vague comments about yourself and then give me shit about my life like you understand what I'm talking about."  
  
"You ever kissed a man?"  
  
"Yeah," he spat out.   
  
"Well, I haven't." He had the temerity to look wistful—almost as much as he looked nervous.  
  
"Good for you!" he replied a little too vehemently. He forced his voice down to something calmer but more bitter. "You just stay there in your unconfused world. It's better that way."  
  
James seemed to ignore his ire and his sarcasm. He kept talking, as though Jack hadn't been punctuating the discussion with snappish comments. "It's just that all I got is vagueness. I don't even know if I want you to kiss me."  
  
Jack let his head fall back against the wall, and he screwed his eyes shut. "Fuck," he muttered. He didn't understand why this should piss him off so badly, but it did. "Fuck you. I didn't ask you to come up here. I sure as hell didn't say or do anything to try to—"  
  
"Oh. No," James said, his voice suddenly rising. "'Course not. You tucked your tail between your legs and ran away."  
  
"Would you have preferred me punching you in the face?"  
  
James shifted in his chair. "You just tell me—do you wanna kiss me or not?"  
  
"Why are you here?"  
  
James rolled his eyes and shook his head. "You can't possibly be this difficult all the goddamn time. Either you left your fucking door open because you wanted me in here or…"  
  
"Or what?"  
  
"Hell, I don't know. Doesn't matter, I don't guess. I don't know what's going on in  _your_  head, but I came up here because I wanna keep talking to you, even if you make me nervous as all holy hell, for reasons I don't even fucking understand. I haven't had anybody to talk to like this in a long time."  
  
"Yeah," Jack said, feeling something inside him settle down, like feathers smoothed over and lying soft and flat again. Even his voice. "Yeah."  
  
The rain was still tapping at the window, and Jack suddenly needed to smoke that last cigarette. He got up and began to shake it out of the pack on the nightstand so he could go back out into the hallway and open the window. James got up, too. Jack really didn't want to be followed outside, but, thankfully, James didn't move toward the door.   
  
James said, "Did you invite me into the alley because you wanted to argue with a roughneck?"  
  
"I thought so. Probably mostly."  
  
"Well, I really thought I punched you in the face because you pissed me off."  
  
Jack turned back around and waited for James to clear out of his way so he could throw open the door, break up the suffocating tension of the room with a little air. But James still didn't move.   
  
He added, "Now, I'm not sure. That  _not sure_  is probably half of why I'm about to kiss you."  
  
Jack froze, that cigarette still clutched in his hands.  
  
"The other half?" Jack said quietly.  
  
James's eyes slid shut, and he gave him this warm, intoxicating smile. He sighed, and Jack saw how much effort he was putting into looking unruffled. Jack wanted to put his hand over his heart and feel if it was racing, maybe even wanted to take his head in his hands and calm him down, but he was still so unsteady with the alcohol, so he didn't move.   
  
Then James opened his eyes again and said, "Heard a speech today. Something about people not letting themselves be so fucking stupid and blind anymore."  
  
Jack wanted to call him on his bullshit, but he had a sinking feeling that it wasn't entirely bullshit, even if there was a tone of self-deprecation and mocking to it, then James was stepping forward and putting his hands on Jack's shoulders and leaning into him and kissing him firmly on the lips.   
  
He could remember giving that kind of kiss: proof of something. He might've let him get away with it, too, if he wasn't so warm and if his body wasn't giving off these waves of tension. Jack had had the impulse to grab him and hold him tight since he'd come up the stairs earlier, so as soon as James planted that kiss and started to draw back, Jack threw an arm around his neck and pulled him back into it, this time letting his lips slide soft against James's. At that second kiss, James opened up a little and their heads tilted just a bit and, suddenly, for the first time, Jack was kissing somebody and really, really feeling it, all the way down to his fucking toes.  
  
He couldn't stop himself from slipping his tongue into James's mouth, and to his shock, it was met quickly but carefully, and unbearably sensually. James's hands hadn't moved an inch, but his lips worked against Jack's like he knew exactly what he was doing. Jack almost swore he'd just been very cleverly seduced, except for those nervous hands clamping down harder and harder on his shoulders. Jack forced the kiss deeper and deeper until James was taking over, pulling back to suck on his lower lip and then sweeping his tongue back inside. His breath was coming fast and warm against Jack's face, but James was keeping himself firmly in control.  
  
At least he had been; when Jack carded his hands up into his hair, rubbing his fingers into his scalp, within seconds James shivered and pulled out of the kiss with a sort of gasp of surprise.   
  
Jack let him go almost instantly, and though James stepped away from him again, he didn't go far. He didn't look at him, either, but Jack could see he was neither angry nor particularly ashamed. He wore an expression that he had several times that night, but only now could Jack really interpret it: the struggle to wrap conscious thinking around a gut reaction. Jack was fighting the same impulse.  
  
"Huh," James finally said.   
  
"Yeah."  
  
James gave him a worried smile. "Yeah, what?"  
  
"Never mind," Jack replied.  
  
He still held that cigarette in his hand, so he nodded toward the door and went to open it and step out, but James grabbed him by the wrist. His eyes met a green-blue pair that looked confused. Hurt, maybe.  
  
Shit, Jack thought. Shit shit shit. That face made something heavy settle in the pit of his stomach.  
  
James said, "That's it?"  
  
"What's it? What are we doing here?"  
  
"I don't know. But…you felt it, didn't you?"  
  
Jack wanted like hell to lie. It would be the easiest thing; admit that it was a good experiment, wish James luck on sorting himself out even if he secretly hoped he'd left him as discombobulated as James's mere presence had him all night. But he couldn't.  
  
He just nodded. So James let him go, and when he went out into the hallway, James didn't follow.  
  
His hands shook on the window latch as he opened it again and they still shook each time he brought the cigarette to his lips. There was a flare of heat and longing inside him, spreading now through his gut. Just before the kiss had broken off, he'd felt his dick start to stir, just from having James that close and his mouth on his. That in and of itself didn't make him too nervous. He'd gotten hard kissing those other guys, but it had been because they were good kissers and they'd leaned into him, pressing their own erections against him, or they'd let their hands wander too close. But this—this was impossibly fast and good and scarier than he had believed possible. Just thinking about it was threatening to make him hard again, so he forced himself to calm down. The rain spattered in through the window, drops of it occasionally hitting his face, and he breathed in the night air as steadily and slowly as he could.  
  
When he worked up the courage to go back inside, James was sitting in that chair by the door again, the whiskey bottle in his hand.  
  
"You come close to polishing this off," James said.   
  
"Yeah." Jack held out his hand for the bottle, but James just shook his head and Jack didn't argue.  
  
Not knowing what else to do, Jack sat down on the bed again, propping himself up against the headboard, his legs pulled up so he could hug them to his chest. James watched him the whole time, apparently waiting for him to get settled before they launched into another conversation. Of course there would be a conversation.  
  
James said, "How far you ever been with a guy?"  
  
"A little farther than that. Not very."  
  
James got quiet again, and the only sound in the room was the swish of the liquid in the bottle.   
  
After a couple of very long minutes, James said: "I had this friend. Not the one I was talking about before. A girl. She was real pretty. Colored."  
  
"Oh."  
  
He nodded. "I could look at her and see that she was about as beautiful as you'd want a girl to be. But I never wanted nothing from her. I… Fuck, I guess I really thought I had some kind of hang up about her being a negro. But I s'pose it could've been something else."  
  
"So you've never been with a woman?"  
  
He shot him a look that clearly said,  _What do you think, idiot?_  But he said, "You can't get by without touching and being touched, you know. But that, just now…"  
  
"You didn't know."  
  
"Not really. I know it doesn't seem possible, old as I am."  
  
Jack snorted softly. "I know exactly how possible it is. I knew from the time I was maybe 13, but I'm still coming to terms with it. Obviously. I was in college before I ever did anything about it." Jack sighed, and he felt a jangling along his nerves again. He was sure his voice shook when he said, "But it never felt like that."  
  
He started to exhale a long breath, knowing they were both saying too much but feeling powerless to stop it, when James abruptly stood up and crossed over to him. Jack's breath caught in his throat as James sat down on the bed beside him and took his jaw in his hands and kissed him again, this time deeply from the start.   
  
But this time, James was also a hell of a lot more nervous. Jack wrapped his arms around him again, desperate to quiet him, but all that seemed to do was make James kiss him more fiercely, almost like he was trying to pull something up out of him. Jack let his legs fall, and he was shocked a moment later when James stood, not breaking the kiss in the slightest, and climbed up onto the bed to straddle him.  
  
It was awkward for a moment, both of them trying to decide what was happening and what was going to happen. James's back arched into the air and Jack found his hands scrabbling at James's waist. Having made the move, James seemed hesitant, but his mouth was far from it, and when he thrust his tongue back inside Jack's mouth, Jack slipped his hands up around to his back and pulled him down on top of him.   
  
James landed a little off-center, and a bit clumsily, too, but it didn't fucking matter, not since Jack could feel how heavy he was, and how solid, that long, lean body melting down into his own. James let out this quiet grunt and set about kissing him even harder than he had before as Jack's hands tugged at his hips, not even thinking, really, just pulling their groins into line together. He was already half hard just from the kissing, but as he felt the James's dick bumping against his, he was suddenly rock hard, and he groaned into James's mouth.  
  
A moment later, James tore out of the kiss and panted against Jack's neck. "God."   
  
Jack shivered at James's breath in his ear, and he nudged his hips up until James was grinding down against him, such perfect pressure it made his eyes snap shut; and even if he was drunk he began to experience everything so distinctly, the smell of his skin and the sound of his breathing and especially the shift and roll of his body above his, all that strength concentrated on the push of holding their hips together.  
  
"Jesus," Jack said against his neck, baring teeth, as his hands clung to him. For a time, they squeezed their bodies together as tightly as they could, but it was almost too much; so Jack thrust up, just for some relief. The sudden friction was like a fucking spark going off inside him, and he couldn't stop himself from rutting against James, and James seemed eager to reciprocate.   
  
It felt good but it was too much, so they quickly settled down and just rocked together slowly. James blindly sought out his mouth again, and Jack just gave himself over to it. He couldn't have tensed up and freaked out if he wanted it. It felt so fucking good, and he didn't have to wonder whether James felt it too. James just kept claiming him with his mouth and his hips, and Jack felt it wash over and over him.  
  
Then all of a sudden, James pulled back, still crouched over him but his body not really making contact anymore. James's eyes were almost shocking, now a dark green, with his pupils blown, not to mention how his lips were wet, kissed a deep pink.   
  
James was panting, "Hold on. Wait."  
  
"Okay."  
  
"We can't keep…"  
  
Jack wondered why he hadn't shifted off of him if he was starting to panic, why he was still on the bed at all. But a moment later, he rolled off him, rolling Jack, too, so that they were lying on their sides face to face. James's hands were up on his neck now, his thumb rubbing over the stubble on his chin and his throat, and though Jack started to squirm closer to him again, James just laughed to himself and held Jack at arms length.  
  
"Let me…calm down a second," he mumbled.  
  
"Oh," Jack said, finally understanding. "Sorry."  
  
"It's okay. Good problem to have."  
  
James finally looked at him, then, with this gaze that shot down into his core. Want. Such want he hadn't thought it possible. He'd imagined James's anger in response to knowing how he felt. He hadn't at all thought about what it might be like if that passion was channeled into touching him and fucking  _looking_  at him like that.  
  
So Jack looked back, and it made him feel brave and sort of powerful. He reached out and lay his hand on James's belt buckle. "We could…"  
  
James closed his eyes.  
  
Jack took his hand back. "Unless that's too—"  
  
"No," James said softly. "I want to."  
  
This time, there was no quick, bold move from either of them. Still, it took a lot of nerve for Jack to move his hand again and struggle with James's belt and then with the button on his fly, finally with his zipper. James's hand came down, then, and stopped him before he turned his attention to Jack's fly. He popped the button and pulled down the zipper, then he waited for Jack to shuck his pants as he pushed his own down over his hips. They kept their boxers on, and they chuckled to themselves as they saw that they were wearing almost identical worn, faded, light blue cotton undershorts.   
  
James's stomach was mesmerizing—taut and a golden brown. A light down of hair ran down into his shorts.  
  
"Did you know," Jack said, "that you're so good looking it's distracting?"  
  
"Jack…"  
  
He was nervous again, but he'd come too far to stop. He smiled and said, "Earlier, at the bar… I hate to tell you, but I learned absolutely nothing about pool."  
  
Before James could say anything, Jack reached out and grasped his dick through his shorts, just as an experiment. James bucked a little into his hand, so Jack hurriedly worked his hand into the slit in front and wrapped his hand around him, feeling a surge of arousal at how hard and hot and heavy he was in his hand, all because of him.   
  
"Uh," James grunted. "Yeah."  
  
Jack let his thumb slip down to the head, where he found that James was already dripping. He'd already known—he'd seen the wet spot on his shorts—but it was different feeling it. As he moved his thumb over James's slit, James clamped his hand down on Jack's arm.  
  
Jack scooted closer to him and said into his ear, "Let me do this."  
  
Instantly, James relaxed a little, but he said, "All right, but it's gonna be…"  
  
Jack looked down between them at his own crotch and said, "I think I know exactly how it's gonna be."  
  
At that, James's hand came off his arm and cupped him through his shorts, the heel of his hand pressing into his dick and his fingers curving down to massage at his balls. But he couldn't seem to concentrate on anything more than that once Jack pulled his dick out through of the slit in his boxers and started stroking him. Every time Jack's hand came down over his head, he groaned, and Jack could feel his own dick getting even more impossibly hard. So he concentrated on watching James's face, what kind of grip and rhythm made his eyelids flutter and his lips part to let out a moan or a gasp of air. He was struck by how, on the one hand, James seemed beautiful to him, no less than any woman he'd ever seen, but yet he was so masculine, strong and hard despite his softness, physically and otherwise.  
  
James was already so close it didn't take very long. James's hand didn't do much there pressed against his dick, but it was all so much that he was just on the verge of coming, too. One of his hands was trapped half under his own body, and he hated that, because he wanted to be able to touch James all over, thrust a hand up his shirt, hold him by the hip, roll his palm over his balls, but he contented himself with sliding that hand under James's neck as the other hand set a fast rhythm, one that grew sloppier and sloppier the more James moved with him, until James was in danger of slipping right out of his grasp. Jack gripped him tighter, and when he did, James groaned.  
  
"Oh. Shit," he gasped. "Oh fuck, I'm gonna-- Oh God."  
  
Jack felt himself start to thrust against James's hand as he jerked him hard, listening to the wet slick sound of it, feeling him get even wetter suddenly as he grunted and came in Jack's hand.  
  
It didn't take much time before James was dragging at the waistband of his shorts and pulling his cock out over them. James's mouth closed over his again, and Jack was still stroking James's cock as James began to jerk him, just as hard and fast as Jack's own hand had been moving. Jack groaned into his mouth and felt his whole body bow into that touch, the elastic snug against his balls and James's palm sliding over his skin. When he finally came, he thought for a moment that he forgot where he was. But he knew exactly who he was with. He thought he'd never forget how that man kissed him, now so open and insistent and sure.  
  
The kiss didn't last for long, though. James seemed to sense that this was somehow all too much, so he let him go and rolled over onto his back so that their bodies weren't touching anymore. In some ways, Jack would've preferred he get up, but it gave him not a small sense of power to know that James must've been three times as afraid but also three times as unable to make that move away from him. So he lay there listening to him breathe, smelling his own familiar musk mixed with all the new smells of James's body and trying not to think too much or too hard. That was easy enough. He suddenly felt rather exhausted, the sated feeling subsiding into a general weariness. But he also thought he was maybe too keyed up to sleep. With all the alcohol he'd had, it would be at least a couple of hours before he could come down from it, or from this, either; his brain was spinning.  
  
The rain had almost stopped again, subsiding to an occasional misting spray against the window, when James finally moved. He got up, gathering his pants and shoes as he did, and slipped into the bathroom and Jack listened to the sound of the water running. His own stomach was sticky, his boxers pulled up just far enough to cover what they needed to cover, and he had the sudden urge to get clean himself. Clean would mean they didn't have to look at each other like they'd just done what they did. Not that he wanted to forget, but he certainly wasn't ready to deal with it. That creeping feeling of fear came up into his chest again, and while it seemed like it was about James and what James might do—even now, after all of that; especially now—he knew it was just guilt twisted into something so overwhelming he wouldn't have to think about how nice guys don't put their hands on other guys' dicks, and if they do, they certainly don't like it.   
  
After a minute or two, James swept out of the bathroom with a lurching couple of steps, despite how carefully he seemed to be trying to carry himself, and stared down at him.  
  
"I gotta get out of here," James said.  
  
"Okay," Jack replied. "Yeah."  
  
"I mean, I can't breathe in here."  
  
Jack wanted to nod, to say he understood, but something about James coming out of the bathroom and looking at him like that cleared out his head. James couldn't breathe, but he could. Maybe it was temporary, but, really, he thought he was just about done freaking out over wanting what he wanted. The other times he'd been drunk or stoned and out to prove something, but he wouldn't have done what they just did, here and now, unless he couldn't help it. James was looking at him like it was inevitable for him, too. That he was far less certain about it made Jack nod his head. Let him slip out into the night. Maybe it was for the best.  
  
"No," James said, his head ducking and shaking loosely as a bemused smile came into his expression. "I mean, it's hot as hell in here. We been cooped up too long, I think."  
  
_We?_ , Jack's face must've said.  
  
"What?" James replied. "You gonna act like we just had some anonymous encounter like I imagine people write about in dirty magazines? Not that I've read any that would… Shit. What I mean—you gonna be all weird, now?"  
  
Jack let a smile ghost over his face. "Uh… No?"  
  
"I don't know what you think about me, but I'm not stupid, I don't do anything I don't wanna do, and I'm not gonna freak out on you."  
  
Jack frowned. "Why do you keep saying that?"  
  
James waved his hand at him.  
  
"Seriously?" Jack said.  
  
"'Cause I ought to," he said emphatically. "I keep thinking I ought to. If my momma knew I was halfway across town screwing around with some…guy I don't know, she'd be…"  
  
"It's more than that."  
  
"Yeah, it's more than that. But the bottom line is, I don't care if it's more than that. I won't let myself…" He sighed, rubbing his hand over his face. "Yeah, no. Anyway, if you wanna sleep, I'll leave you alone. But I feel like going for a walk. I ain't sleeping anytime soon. I doubt you are either. You can come, if you want."  
  
"Do you want me to?"  
  
"Didn't I ask you, you stupid fuck?"  
  
Jack found a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. "Okay."  
  
"You get cleaned up, and I'll wait for you outside."  
  
"Okay."  
  
Jack waited for him to close the door before he got up off the bed and padded into the bathroom. He was perhaps even stickier with come than James had been, up over his stomach and chest, and though he contemplated a shower, there was no time for it. Never mind that maybe he simply didn't want to wash the evidence away, replace the scent of James's body with motel soap. He cleaned himself up as best he could with a washcloth and a towel and ran his hands over his hair, pausing to look at himself in the mirror, closely. He still looked the same. A little haggard, maybe, but still flushed. Oddly calm.

He was less calm as he slipped back out into the night, the dampness sinking into his bones even before the breeze hit him. James shivered at the wind, too, as he tossed a cigarette to the ground and nodded his head in the direction of the highway. They headed out across the parking lot in silence.   
  
They didn't seem any more eager to talk when they turned and pursued a path up the shoulder of the road, a mix of gravel and, tonight, mud. On Jack's end, the silence was because he didn't know what to say. He had no doubt, though, that James did. He would simply have to wait for him to say it.  
  
Jack set himself to absorbing as much of his surroundings as he could, as he had on their earlier walk, but he found that he was both too nervous and too tired to concentrate. His mind kept wandering, his consciousness landing on a lot of things he didn't want to think about just now, but as soon as he managed to banish one concern, his mind drifted around to another. He was only jolted out of this swirl of thoughts enough to pay attention to his surroundings when they passed an American flag, hanging heavy with water, outside an auto garage, and only then because James gestured at the flag and snorted darkly.  
  
"Fucking disgraceful," he said.  
  
"It's probably legal, though." A light was fixed on it, and as long as it was of the proper all-weather material, it was fine to display it like that.  
  
James said, "A lot of things are legal. Don't make 'em right." James paused, then he asked, "You ain't one of those…?"  
  
Jack just glared at him. "I would never burn a flag. I don’t like this, either, but it's not like I can do anything about it. I have to think they've got a reason for wanting it up all night, even in the rain."  
  
James sighed. "Maybe."  
  
"Maybe they know somebody over there."  
  
James nodded again, and just as Jack was sure they were going to fall into silence again, James said, "You never told me why you don't know if Marc's alive or not."  
  
Jack took a deep breath. "He was shot. In the leg. At least that's what his platoon reported. But he went down in an area where they couldn't get to him."  
  
"He a POW?"  
  
"Technically MIA, but, yeah," Jack said quietly. "They're pretty sure he's a POW. Or else…" He could never let himself change the M to a K, at least not out loud.   
  
"Jesus." James ruffled his hand back over his hair, pointedly not looking at him, then he seemed to think better of that. He stared at him long and hard enough to catch Jack's gaze. "Look. I'm sorry about what I said earlier. Before I hit you."  
  
"You didn’t know."  
  
"Well, I shouldn't have opened my damn mouth."  
  
"Look who you're talking to. I'm honestly surprised it took you that long to hit me."  
  
"I don't wanna hit you. I sorta admire the hell out of what you're doing."  
  
"Even if I'm going about it all wrong?"  
  
"Not all wrong. It takes a lot of guts to try and do something. 'Specially not knowing where he is."  
  
"For all the shit I talk, I'm pretty much a coward."  
  
"No."  
  
"It's true."  
  
"Well, I know one thing you're not a coward about."   
  
It was the most direct thing he'd said about what they'd just done since Jack walked outside to meet him again. Part of him wanted to let it go, but James was looking at him expectantly, like maybe this was the only time in his life he'd let himself be really honest about it.  
  
Jack said, "Ten years of knowing and not doing much about it."  
  
"Least you knew."  
  
"So did you."  
  
James shook his head. "I'm pretty fucking good at ignoring things I don't wanna think about."  
  
"Are you gonna think about it when I'm gone?"  
  
"Maybe," he said a little too quickly. But then he turned his head to look at him. "Do you watch the draft lotteries?"  
  
For a moment, he was thrown by the sudden shift in the conversation, but he said, "Yeah. Who doesn't?"  
  
"I don't."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
James shook his head.   
  
"Scared?" Jack said. It began to sink in, finally, why James had brought up the draft.   
  
"Everybody's scared. I just know… Well, I know I can't get out of it. I couldn't go up to Canada. I can't even fucking get my foot out of this town."  
  
"You want to?" Jack asks, knowing the answer, just from James's tone, but not really believing it, somehow.  
  
"God, yeah. Sometimes I think it would be better to be anywhere but here. Even over there. I mean, I don't actually think that, but that's how much I feel…"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"What do you mean, yeah? L.A.'s a big place. How the hell could you feel like that out there?"  
  
"My father's there."   
  
James sighed out a breath, then he made a noise Jack couldn't interpret before he moved on. "Anyway," he said, "I envy you. I really do. Get to go live your own fucking life. Go anywhere you want."  
  
"And nobody on earth gives so much as half a shit about me."  
  
"I know that ain't true."  
  
"Maybe not. I mean, my mother cares, but she's…"  
  
"Mothers. Yeah." After a pause, James chuckled sardonically. "Why do we keep going down these depressing trains of thought?"  
  
"If we whine about our parents we won't have to talk about…anything else."  
  
"You wanna talk?" He shook his head, smiling. "Why should that surprise me."  
  
"I didn't say I wanted to. I'm good at avoiding shit, too," he said with a roguish smile.  
  
"Uh huh. Like you were good at avoiding picking a fight with me downtown."  
  
"I avoided kissing you, didn't I?"  
  
James didn't reply for a moment, but when he did, he shocked the hell out of him: "You're a good kisser."  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
He nodded his head and gave him a acerbic smile. "Not that I would know. I do know it's all a damn sight easier than making it with a girl."  
  
"Not that I would know," Jack said, faintly echoing him.  
  
James just shook his head, snorting out an amused breath.  
  
Jack said, "So why do you think flying all over the goddamned country has to be a good life?"  
  
"We gonna start the shit again?"  
  
"It's either that or talk about…"  
  
James laughed. "Yeah yeah yeah. Okay. Fine. Here's how I see it. You get to see everything so you can make up your mind about everything like you know what the fuck you're talking about."  
  
"Except what I'm seeing is the same shit I see in L.A., just with different accents. Bored rich kids and even more bored hippies. You're only the second or third person to ever actually show me the town, the real one, not just the college, and you know what? People are people."  
  
"Even when they've got Confederate flags in their windows?"  
  
"Even."  
  
"Because my house does."  
  
Jack almost stopped, but James was still walking, so he kept stride beside him. "You're serious?"  
  
"It's small. My father put it up in an attic window, and my mother ain't been up there since…he left, so, yeah. I suppose that makes me a fucking hick."  
  
"James…"  
  
He watched James's nostrils flare, at first thinking it was simply a reaction to his pitying tone, but then he realized it had more to do with something brewing inside him. For some reason, he was finally choosing to let it out.  
  
James said, "You think I don't know how screwed up it is down here? My mother…" He smiled sardonically, throwing his head back. "God, my mother lives and breathes by what a bunch of wrinkled up old crones with just enough money to be dangerous say to her. She don't see anything wrong with living under their thumbs. Everywhere you look is some person with crazy rules that you gotta follow, and if you don't, you're screwed. Not like they'd tell you what they are, though. You just gotta know 'em. Well, I know 'em, and I don't like 'em. Worst of it is half the people in this town know how much of it's bullshit, but nobody does a damn thing about it. 'Specially not me. I just coast on through. I don't have the guts to leave and I don't have the guts to rebel against it. What?"  
  
"Nothing."  
  
"Jack…"  
  
"Never mind."  
  
"Are you even listening?"  
  
"Of course I'm listening. I swear to God. But do you know what your voice does when you get excited about something?" He tried not to let a grin form at his lips, but he couldn't help it, not when James already seemed to be reacting to his tone with a slow, half-annoyed smile, despite how worked up he was.  
  
James began to translate that frustrated anger into a bark, but it held little bite, not with the way his smile had turned sheepish. "I might've known."  
  
"What?"  
  
"This"—he gestured between them vaguely—"is about me being a southerner."  
  
"You're crazy. If there's such a thing as a mystique about southerners…like that, it's nothing compared to how…"  
  
"There's a reason I keep saying I'm not gonna hit you." James let out a long breath of air and Jack watched his chest deflate a little, and his face. "So if you were listening…?"  
  
"You were talking about rebellion. You can't view it like rebellion, by the way. That's like a kid throwing a temper tantrum just to get attention."  
  
"Sounds like a lot of marches I've seen."  
  
Jack nodded. "I often wonder why some people are drawn to these protests, if maybe they just need something to resist. Sometimes I think I'm just doing this to get back at my father."  
  
"It's not just that."  
  
"I know that. But sometimes I wonder, that's all. Or it's because he said we couldn't accomplish anything."  
  
"That's why you're doing it."  
  
"I know."  
  
"I mean, because you don't want to become your father."  
  
"Maybe."  
  
"No maybe. Nobody ever wants to become their father. I sure as hell don't."  
  
"Is he a miserable man who's disappointed in everything you do?"  
  
"Naw," James said quietly. "He's a coward who runs away from shit he can't handle. That, by the way, is why I'm walking down the road with you right now."  
  
"To piss off your father?"  
  
"To make sure I'm not like him."  
  
It got quiet, then, enough that Jack began to listen for their footfalls against the wet pavement and gravel, until he was finally counting them. But it was too quiet, and although Jack knew what he wanted to say—although he no longer feared saying what he meant, not to James—his heart started to beat in counterpoint to his footsteps until he pushed the words out:  
  
"You can handle this."  
  
"Seems like it," he murmured.  
  
"James…"  
  
"I'm pretty sure the freaking out hasn't even started yet."  
  
"What happened to  _I don't ever do anything I don't wanna do_?"  
  
"It's true. But I regret a hell of a lot after." After a pause, he added, "It doesn't have anything to do with it being you. It's all on me."  
  
"It's stupid."  
  
"Probably."  
  
"No, look at me." James's sea green eyes snapped up and over to his instantly. "It's really, really stupid."  
  
"I know."  
  
They walked along in silence for a moment, Jack trying to make his eyes and ears focus on the strange quiet town around him, nothing now but the sporadic rustle of a solitary car on the highway and the intermittent howl of the wind and the even blinking of red lights at the four way stop. But the thing his eyes kept coming back to was James, walking beside him, eyes on the road, neck bowed in surrender or contemplation or both.  
  
Jack found himself nervous leaving James to his thoughts for too long. Not yet.  
  
Jack said, "I keep wondering why you came to the hotel."  
  
James softly snorted out a laugh. "I didn't realize how starved for conversation I was until I realized I'd rather butt heads with you than talk to anybody I know."  
  
Jack nodded.  
  
"What time's your flight tomorrow?"  
  
The question shocked him for some reason. It took him a moment to come up with the answer. "Noon."  
  
"Out of Birmingham?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"You got anybody to drive you?"  
  
"Somebody at the house."  
  
"Well, I'll do it. If you ain't sick of me."  
  
Jack held his face tight against a goofy but confused smile. He nodded, and after he did, James nodded his head back in the direction they'd come from and turned, motioning for Jack to follow.  
  
"Should you call somebody?" Jack said.  
  
"Momma's asleep. She ain't missed me yet."  
  
"But if she knew you weren't in the house…?"  
  
"Who the hell can ever tell what she'll do. Maybe she'd shrug her shoulders and gripe at me tomorrow. Maybe she'd call all the hospitals and sit up worrying till I get home."  
  
"But you're not gonna call?"  
  
"Jack," he said, suddenly serious, or maybe just weary. "She's had three or four cocktails. She ain't waking up anytime soon."  
  
Jack just nodded, shifting his eyes back to the road under his feet.  
  
James said, "I love her. I do. She's my mother. But sometimes I think if I never get out of that house…"  
  
"Why don't you?"  
  
"And leave her like my father left her?"  
  
Jack let that comment lie and James shook out his last cigarette from a pack and lit it up.  
  
After some of the heaviness dissipated, Jack said, "Maybe it's not a question of leaving, you know?"  
  
"What isn't?"  
  
"You act like the only thing you can do is get out of town. Maybe the thing is to try and change things where you are."  
  
"Which ain't exactly easy to do."  
  
"No. But things change."  
  
"Or I change."  
  
"Isn't that something?"  
  
James gave him a queasy-looking frown.  
  
Jack said, "Besides, you don't actually hate it here."  
  
"Oh. I don't?"  
  
"As you're so fond of saying to me, don't bullshit me. I've been listening to you talk about this town—and the south—all night. You don't hate it."  
  
James shook his head. "It's fucked up."  
  
"Every place is fucked up."  
  
Jack reached out his hand for James's cigarette, and he handed it over so Jack could take a drag. Jack held onto it and took another drag, and finally James shook his head, grinning in annoyance, and began to talk.  
  
"I don't hate it. Truth is, I can't imagine being anywhere else. People might get in your business all the time, but they care. Do anything for you. It ain't near as fucked up as people make it sound."  
  
"I know that. Now."  
  
"I wish you'd been down here when everything's blooming. You ain't never seen so much green and white. We got good live music, too."  
  
"And cheap whiskey," Jack said.  
  
James said, "Were you serious before? You don't like L.A.?"  
  
"Everybody hates their hometown. The thing about a big city, you don't think of yourself living in the whole city, really. There's too much of it. You keep to the parts of it you know and like the best, especially close to home. I don't particularly care for the area my parents' house is in, but where I live, up near the campus, is cool. Always something going on. We have this diner, out near the freeway, that stays open all night. Serves breakfast, mostly. I can't tell you how many times I've had pancakes at 3:30 in the morning."  
  
James said, "Ain't no place around here like that. Least not on the regular side of town. One place I wish was, though."  
  
"When does it open?"  
  
"Seven? I don't know."  
  
"Maybe by seven o'clock," Jack said with a sly smile, "I'll want food."  
  
James gave him a long look, then he chuckled to himself. "And what the hell you propose we do for"—he checked his watch—"four hours?"  
  
"Sleep?"   
  
James eyed him skeptically. "I'm gonna come back to your hotel room and we're gonna sleep?"  
  
Jack shrugged.   
  
"You're just a little nuts, you know?"  
  
"So I've been told."  
  
James frowned, but he couldn't entirely keep the smile out of his eyes. "You're just gonna take my word for it the food's worth it?"  
  
"Sure," Jack said with an easy smile, suddenly feeling that chemistry crackle between them again. When James smiled back, he looked like he was smiling with a purpose, and Jack wanted so very badly to reach out and touch him, somehow, his tight shoulders or his taut stomach, but he kept his hands at his sides and just walked on, grinning.  
  
They walked the rest of the way in silence, and when they reached the parking lot, James stopped at his car and pulled a new pack of cigarettes out of the glove box. He lit one as he reached the door and sent Jack in ahead of him. The rain was starting up again, light and cool against his skin. But once inside again, he found the same warm world, just this short of suffocating.   
  
He made himself breathe slowly, finding that as he climbed the stairs and let himself back into his room, the warmth started to feel less smothering and more comforting, like the world was wrapping tight around him, trying to help him hold all the pieces of himself together, just for a little while longer. If nothing else, his body's reaction to the heat made him know he might be able to sleep after all. Of course, he would if he were going to be alone. But he wasn't, he reminded himself. He wasn't, and that made the difference.  
  
Jack was lying in the bed in his t-shirt and pants, heart pounding up into his throat, sure that James had already climbed into his car and driven away, when he heard a faint knock and saw the door swing open. James came to the side of the bed and looked down at him almost confusedly for a moment, and without much conscious thought, Jack just scooted over and made room for him. James's face quirked into an odd smile, but he began to divest himself of all his things, his cigarettes and car keys and wallet and finally his shoes.   
  
When he lay down beside Jack, both of them on their backs, the bed dipped and creaked and Jack's arm lay against his.  
  
James said, "Bed's too small for this."  
  
"Yeah."  
  
After a moment, James chuckled darkly, then again. Eventually, it turned into a full-blown giggle, but one still sardonic in its intensity.   
  
"What?" Jack said.  
  
"I am never in my life gonna lay eyes on you again, am I?"  
  
Jack's stomach squeezed in on itself. He'd always thought things like that were just metaphor, but he could literally feel it. It was a little like panic.  
  
"That's funny, somehow?" Jack snapped.  
  
James retorted, "I sure as hell ain't gonna let it be fucking depressing."  
  
When the force of his words finally dropped out of the air, Jack offered, "We could always—"  
  
"Don't say bullshit you don't mean."  
  
"People always mean it when they say it."  
  
"Still bullshit."  
  
"No."  
  
He could hear James breathing, there in the dark, and the rain tapping against the window glass. Suddenly, he was tired, so tired of this long, impossible day and the kind of shit it had stirred up in his brain. His body, too. He didn't want to think about what was coming. Maybe he could, in the daylight. In the daylight he could face a lot of things and be the brave person he needed to be. But when he lay down to sleep at night, a lot of things he tried not to think about plagued him, and tonight was no different. Worse, maybe, for all he had this person breathing into the close air beside him, just as fucked up as he was, too. But it was better, too. Better in a way it hadn't been since Marc left. That thought made him feel a little hollow and wounded, but it made him resolute that no, he wouldn't let this James Ford recede in his mind, become as unreal as his other memories of backwater Alabama would in the weeks and months and years to come. He simply wouldn't let him. And that, he knew, wasn't bullshit at all.  
  
Jack's arm turned, and he opened his palm up to James's forearm, sliding it down until he could circle his wrist.  
  
James sighed into the darkness. "People always mean it?"   
  
"Yeah."  
  
"But still," James said. "Ain't there some other way to say it?"  
  
James turned over and faced him and reached out with his hand, laying it along his jaw, warm and unsure. Jack felt a shock of electricity all along his body as James shifted over and settled in against him, slinging an arm over his chest and a leg over his thigh, as his mouth searched out his tentatively, those soft lips landing first on his jaw and then dragging with a sigh of warm air up and over to his lips.   
  
Jack felt a sigh shake his whole body as he opened up his lips against James's, and when he slipped his tongue into his mouth almost desperately, he felt James fall into it, too, into whatever this half crazy thing was they were doing. He still didn't understand quite how this negotiation worked itself out, like so many others before it, but he was thankful that James was now suddenly far from tentative, once again the same man who'd called him a fucking moron hours earlier—probably without at all understanding why.  
  
Jack thought, now, that he understood. In the end, that would just have to be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> The title of the work comes from a song by Creedence Clearwater Revival.


End file.
